Colonizing Mars: How it Will Happen in our Lifetime

About the Author

Frank Norris has a degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Florida. He worked most of his career on the Space Shuttle program, including developing theoretical models to predict Space Shuttle system performance. His easy-to-read style takes us on a journey to explain how colonizing Mars might really occur and why we should care.

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Frank Norris 2023

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Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

Norris, Frank

Colonizing Mars

ISBN 9798889103837 (Paperback)

ISBN 9798889103844 (Hardback)

ISBN 9798889103851 (ePub e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023913699

www.austinmacauley.com/us

First Published 2023

Austin Macauley Publishers LLC

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New York, NY 10005

USA

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Acknowledgment

I would like to thank my wife, Anne, for putting up with me being locked in my office for weeks on end, developing and researching the concepts. This was followed by weeks of writing. She put up with it and with me. I would like to nominate her for sainthood, but I am not sure how to do that.

Introduction

I am an aerospace engineer and perhaps a bit of a scientist, though definitely more on the practical side of finding solutions to real problems rather than expanding knowledge where there is no ‘problem’ that we are facing. I was a math major before switching to engineering. When I was much younger, I dropped out of college for a couple of years but became fascinated with the idea of space travel and the survival of the human species, mostly through the writings of a few scientists and a bit of science fiction. Those who inspired me included Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and others. This led me to go back to college to do what I could to help the space program and perhaps have a small part in saving the human species from the fate of viruses in a limited environment like a Petri dish. (They all die.)

After getting out of college (aerospace engineering degree, University of Florida), I got a job on the Space Shuttle program and worked in various roles for almost 31 years. For the first couple of years, I developed theoretical models to predict performance of space shuttle systems. I often read graduate-level texts to learn new topics and the supporting math in order to do this. In writing this book, I have done quite a bit of the same. I have researched formulas for the power requirements of cryogenic chillers; I have studied radiation impacts, and so many other topics. My background is structures, strength of materials, aerodynamics, and rocket propulsion.

I have also covered numerous other topics in this book, everything from farming to compressors. I do not claim to be an authority on every topic but I would say I have learned enough to make valid statements based on research and to do the math on these topics. We can go to Mars, and I believe we will.

Why

I don’t think the human race will survive the next thousand years, unless we spread into space. There are too many accidents that can befall life on a single planet. But I am an optimist. We will reach out to the stars.

Stephen Hawking, astrophysicist

Life on Earth may be unique. We don’t know. There may be many planets with intelligent life but there also might not be. What if we are the only intelligent life in our galaxy or even just the only intelligent life for a hundred light years (600,000,000,000,000 miles)? That would make our existence very precious, but even if we aren’t the only intelligence, I think the human species is still very, very precious. Wouldn’t we do almost anything to save our entire species? I love my children and want them to survive, more than life itself. I also love my grandchildren and want them to survive. Why not 20 generations down the line even if I never meet them? I for one think it is imperative that our species survives. I believe life is precious and especially sentient life. I think and therefore I am, as Descartes said. He used it as a philosophical proof for something else, but I think it also could just mean ‘I matter’. I believe that life, and especially intelligence and self-awareness, matter a lot. I want us to persist no matter what happens. I hope you do too.

That is why we must do something. This Earth is vulnerable.

Meteors have struck the Earth before. It is now an accepted fact that one of them wiped out the dinosaurs sixty-million years ago. The crater scientists believe is the impact that caused it is off the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula in the Gulf of Mexico. We have craters to show for others too. The extent of damage is caused by the size and makeup of the meteor. One struck Russia in 1908, referred to as the Tunguska event (google it). It was apparently a rocky object, only about 50–60 meters across. It didn’t even make it to the ground. It exploded in the air but blew over an estimated 8,000,000 trees across 2150 km² (830 miles²)[1]. That is a radius of 26 kilometers (16 miles), larger than many of our cities. The destruction is shown in the photograph in Figure 1.

The Tunguska asteroid may have been too small to even draw attention with current tracking but could have wiped out a city. Its detonation exceeded the power of almost any nuclear weapon exploded to date just because of its speed coming in (about 97,000 km/hour). However, some objects flying around in space are mostly iron and much bigger. It is estimated that to wipe out all life on Earth (burn us alive, so you kill bacteria too) would take an object about 96 km (60 miles) in diameter [2]. This is NASA’s number and why they have an ‘asteroid watch’.

However, even one 11 or 12 km in diameter, similar to what wiped out the dinosaurs, would throw up a dust cloud that would cover the earth for years killing most vegetation, most animals, and probably billions of humans. Some would survive but that is probably worse than any disaster movie ever. Who knows what, if anything, would be left of our civilization.

Figure 1: Tunguska Event in 1908 flattened 2,150 square kilometers of forest.

It was only a 50–60 meter wide meteorite.

There are many other ways we could be destroyed. What if someone started a nuclear war? It is scary how easily this could happen. We have multiple super powers and several lesser powers that have nuclear weapons. The leaders of some of these countries change frequently with half the population often thinking the wrong person or possibly even a dangerous person is in power. (Maybe one of them will be.) Other countries are more autocratic. Their leaders rarely change and may continue in power after they have lost their rational mental capabilities. Many westerners believe that is the case already in at least one country. There are other countries that if they get a nuclear weapon might use it. This could easily lead to escalation.

Assuming it is all-out between two super-powers, it would probably be in the class of the wipe-out-the-dinosaurs event described above. The detonation of thousands of nuclear weapons would poison much of the planet for decades and possibly create dust clouds resulting in a ‘nuclear winter’. That is close to a species killer.

Another issue is the planet’s natural resources. We rely on them. We need them for the power to run industry, to heat our houses, and to get to work. Eventually, we will use them up. Why not do something about that while we still have resources and can. And don’t just say we will use ‘renewable resources’. Solar power requires silicon and other materials. The silicon manufacturing process is one of the major sources of fluorine-based greenhouse gases, some of which have hundreds or even thousands of times the infrared absorption of carbon dioxide. I am not saying no solar at all. I am all for solar. I am just saying that it has its limits too. Eventually, we will have no resources left or will have ruined the planet. We have the resources now.

Many people think we are killing ourselves with global warming. I am not an alarmist on this at all but will say we are having some effect and it could get a lot worse if we don’t make the right decisions. I don’t mean in the next few years but certainly over time. We are putting some greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that have lives of thousands of years and absorb infrared (the cause of a greenhouse effect) at hundreds or even thousands of times the rate of CO2. The quantities are not huge on a planetary scale, but if we keep doing it for decades or even centuries we will have an irreversible effect that could last for thousands of years. Also, how do we control what the worst polluters like China and India do? They are exempt from the Paris Accord as ‘developing nations’ (who negotiated that with the number 2 and number 6 economies in the world).

One final thing that WILL destroy the Earth is the sun. It is growing and expanding and eventually will turn the Earth into a scorching lifeless desert. This is not going to happen for millions of years, but the point is the Earth will eventually be uninhabitable. The only question is when. If we do it, it will probably happen soon. If an asteroid or comet does it, it could happen any time, though a planet destroying event is obviously not that frequent. However, our species is too precious to leave our existence to chance.

So what do we do about this, while we can? A very good solution is for our species to move to more than one world. That protects us from most of the possible ends to the species at least.

So how do we do this? Let’s start with where we would go.

We start by looking in our own solar system. There are many planets and moons, but most are uninhabitable. They lack the resources; they lack the conditions, including our own moon. It has no air, very little water, and has burning hot days and freezing nights. Venus and Mercury are hotter and worse. Jupiter and out from there have a tiny fraction of our sunlight and cryogenic temperatures.

Where do we look then? The best answer is Mars. Is it Earth-like? No. Can it sustain life as it is? Well, maybe no, but it does have the things we need to survive there using a little bit of engineering. It has a CO2 atmosphere. It has water, actually a lot of it, and we can use that for consumption, making oxygen, and watering crops. The combination of CO2 and water mean we can make rocket fuel, which gives us a way to go back and forth. Finally, we could take inflatable greenhouses and grow our own food. So yes, it has what we need to survive if we apply our skills at harnessing its resources. This is not true of anywhere else in the solar system. It is also one of our closest neighbors. Therefore, Mars answers the ‘where’.

We are in a deep gravity well on Earth and it is hard to go anywhere else. That (plus a lot of bureaucracy) is why governments have spent billions to get humans anywhere, even just to orbit. However, getting to orbit can be done at much lower and steadily falling costs by private industry and if we can produce rocket fuel on Mars it gets a lot easier to go there and back and we can. Robert Zubrin made this point in his book, The Case for Mars. Being able to make rocket fuel there is critical to credible, cost-effective travel.

So now we know where and just a thread of how. Join me for a much deeper journey on how we will do it. As Plato once said: I will not say this is a true story, but I will say that it is a likely story. By that I mean I am not a SpaceX employee nor do I have access to their detailed planning. In fact, they may not have planned this far, but I will tell you how it can and perhaps will be done. I started this journey by confirming their math and wound up with a potential architecture for colonization.

History

Our two greatest problems are gravity and paperwork. We can lick gravity but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming.

Werner Von Braun, rocket scientist

The Early Days

The concept of a manned mission to Mars was created by Werner Von Braun. Many know him as the father of the Apollo Program. He was also the chief architect of the V2 rocket used by Germany during World War II to bomb England. At the end of World War II we snuck him and many other German engineers and scientists out of Germany and brought them to America. He worked here first on ballistic missiles for the Army and later for NASA.

Way back in the late 1940’s after being brought to America at the end of World War II, he conceived the idea of a manned mission to Mars and worked out the details. He wrote a book on it in 1949 in German. It was later translated to English and the English version was rereleased in 1952. It was called The Mars Project (or Das Marsprojekt). The cover is shown in Figure 2. It described a fleet of 10 rockets, each with a mass of 3,720 metric tons, which are assembled in orbit at a space station. Three are unmanned and transport a winged landing craft each, as shown on the cover. The other seven carry a total of 70 astronauts. He clearly had done his homework. All of the math was described and it is reported to have been accurate. He was brilliant and definitely thought big.

Figure 2: The Mars Project, Werner Von Braun’s 1949 book

The book described using Hohmann transfer orbits to get to Mars and back, which is the least possible energy trajectory from one orbit (Earth around the Sun) to another (Mars around the Sun). He even worked out the supplies needed for the crew. Several years later, perhaps when he realized the cost involved and federal budgets, he created a scaled down concept. It only involved 2 ships, one with astronauts and one with cargo.

He later became the director of the Marshall Space Flight center and the chief architect of the Saturn V rocket that took us to the moon. (I