Monday, January 26, 2009

The Colonization Fleet

To guarantee the success of a Manned Colonization mission we must send a fleet of space ships. Wernher von Braun envisioned a fleet of ten spacecraft . The exploration of mars could be done with a couple of ships, but the colonization of mars will require more than half a dozen people.

 

Wernher von Braun walking with President Kenne...Wernher von Braun also worked out preliminary concepts for a manned Mars mission which used the space station as a staging point. His initial plans, published in The Mars Project (1952), had envisaged a fleet of ten spacecraft (each with a mass of 3,720 metric tons), three of them unmanned and each carrying one 200-ton winged lander[29] in addition to cargo, and nine crew vehicles transporting a total of 70 astronauts. Gigantic as this mission plan was, its engineering and astronautical parameters were thoroughly calculated. A later project was much more modest, using only one purely orbital cargo ship and one crewed craft. In each case, the expedition would use minimum-energy Hohmann transfer orbits for its trips to Mars and back to Earth.   from Wikipedia

The Mars Project,  By Wernher Von Braun, Henry J. White (The book on google)IMG_1353

 Saturn V, NASA

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Saturn V, NASA

Exploration of Mars

Computer-generated image of one of the two Mar...

Image via Wikipedia

When are we going to colonize Mars? I previously reviewed the Exploration_of_Mars wikipedia entry. In my opinion with some initiative we could launch the initial unmanned "Earth Return Vehicle" (ERV) at  the end of this year….

A manned mission would have to overcome the common challenges. A large scale commercial expedition would probably succeed in putting a manned colony on Mars in February 2012.

 

There are several key challenges that a human mission to Mars must overcome:

  1. physical effects of exposure to high-energy cosmic rays and other ionizing radiation[1]
  2. physical effects of a prolonged low-gravity environment
  3. physical effects of a prolonged low-light environment
  4. psychological effects of isolation from Earth
  5. psychological effects of lack of community due to lack of real-time connections with Earth
  6. social effects of several humans living under crowded conditions for over one earth year
  7. inaccessibility of terrestrial medical facilities

 

 

 

The Case for Mars

"Case for Mars" is also the name of a series of conferences held at the University of Colorado in Boulder between 1981 and 1996, advocating human exploration of Mars and developing technology and mission concepts to do so.

The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must is a nonfiction science book by Robert Zubrin, first published in 1996. Richard Wagner worked as a supporting author.

The book details Zubrin's Mars Direct plan to make the first human landing on Mars.

 

Revision history of Exploration of Mars

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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About this blog

The promise of our species is to become a Spacefaring species. The most obvious initial destination is our neighboring planet away from the sun. The red planet...In this blog i share and ponder the exploration and colonization of Mars.

Image results for mars
  1. http://www.hoax-slayer.com/mars-earth-close.html http://startswithabang.com/?p=237 http://www.gearthblog.com/blog/archives/2006/03/user_develops_m.html http://astrobiology.nasa.gov/nai/seminars/detail/88


Spacefaring societies or nations are those capable of building and launching vehicles into space.[1][2] A more strict criteria defines spacefaring nations as those that can build, launch and return human spaceflight missions. "Spacefaring" is analogous to seafaring.

Spacefaring requires the vehicle assembly and launch facilities, as well as advanced astronautics, and a program to train astronauts. The problems of life support must be solved in proportion to the distance travelled. Presently there has never been a manned mission outside of the Earth-Moon system, though the dream of travelling to Mars is persistent in literature and popular culture. from