Barack Obama and NASA want humans to live off the land, on Mars

Barack Obama wrote a story for CNN outlining plans for manned missions to Mars by 2030. “We have set a clear goal vital to the next chapter of America’s story in space: sending humans to Mars by the 2030s and returning them safely to Earth, with the ultimate ambition to one day remain there for an extended time,” Obama Wrote . NASA is building space habitats in partnership with various private companies to accomplish this.

The article comes two weeks after Elon Musk outlined his plans for making human life interplanetary . Musk had said during his presentation, that his ambitious plans that did not just stop at Mars , was an effort to get more people talking about establishing permanent human settlements on other planets and moons. People are talking about it. A week after Musk outlined his plans, the chief executive officer of Boeing, Dennis Muilenburg revealed his intentions to carry out the first manned mission to Mars. The mission is planned not for research or establishing colonies, but as tourists , as reported by Yahoo.

NASA plans to have a manned mission to Mars by 2030. The SpaceX Dragon II is planned to go on a pathfinding mission to Mars to scout out for suitable locations for humans in 2018 and 2020. The cheapest and fastest way to get to Mars is to send spacecraft when Mars and Earth are in particular positions called launch windows. There are launch windows roughly every two years, which could mean that there could be a lot of traffic between Earth and Mars every two years during the launch windows if all the current plans of NASA, SpaceX and Boeing are carried out.

The technical developments to support these missions have moved beyond just spacecraft and rockets. The pioneers on Mars will have to be supported with food, shelter, fuel and waste disposal. NASA plans to provide this support using the resources available locally on Mars. The missions on Mars will have to use a technique called in-situ resource utilization or ISRU. A small propellant plant is planned to be on the first SpaceX colonial ship to Mars. The plant is expected to be expanded over time, over the course of subsequent missions. The idea is to mine the water and carbon dioxide that is abundantly available on Mars, to make cryogenic methane based fuel with superior technical characteristics. NASA also has plans for using locally available resources, and it goes beyond just fuel.

The ISRU research is mostly being conducted at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, directed by the former space shuttle astronaut Robert D Cabana. “It was an incredible accomplishment when we went to the moon. We stayed for a couple of days and took some rocks home. We explored,” said Cabana “But, now we want to be pioneers. As pioneers, we will create a sustained human presence in an ever more extreme environment. We now want to go to Mars.”

Astronauts going to Mars will take a year to a year and a half to reach the planet and come back, not counting the time spent on the surface. Because of the distance and the few launch windows, there cannot be resupply missions like the ones that regularly go up to the International Space Station. Equipment is being manufactured and tested to harvest resources to make fuel, as well as consumables for the life support systems. The equipment will have to work in extreme and alien conditions. At the poles, the temperature is minus one twenty six degrees Celsius and twenty degrees Celsius at the equator. The machines will have to operate in an atmosphere made up of ninety five per cent carbon dioxide.

The air and soil will be used by Astronauts, even though they are so different from Earth. NASA plans multiple pathfinding missions to identify suitable sites, and make sure that the necessary resources are available when the astronauts need them. The first is an orbiter with instruments on board that will scan Mars for potential landing sites from space. After potential locations are identified, rovers will be sent on the surface to verify the presence of the necessary resources.

NASA has used the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) have scanned the moon for resource rich sites. NASA is sending a Resource Prospector to the Moon, the first attempt at mining on another celesital body. The Resource Prospector is headed to the poles of the moon, where LCROSS spectacularly crashed into the surface and showed that there was water on the Moon.

Jackie Quinn, project manager for LCROSS said “Our objective is to go to the moon’s poles where the LCROSS and LRO missions told us that what we previously thought was a dry moon is actually a quite moist moon.” The Resource Prospector mission is scheduled for 2020, and will extract hydrogen, oxygen and water. NASA plans to learn more about how to extract resources for fuel, and water from the ice on Mars.

Gravity on Mars is sixty two percent lower than that on Earth. This means that excavators do not need to be as bulky as they are on Earth. It also means designing new kinds of excavators for low gravity environments, technology that can potentially be used to mine asteroids as well. The mining on Mars can be done by a NASA robot called Regolith Advanced Surface Systems Operations Robot (RASSOR). Martian regolith, which is crushed rock devoid of any organic matter, can potentially be used to construct 3D printed shelters for the astronauts as well.

Growing crops in space is another area of focus for the research. It is not easy to grow crops out of regolith, so NASA is figuring out the nutrients that need to be added to the soil, how to water the crops and lighting them with LEDs. Student citizen scientists are contributing to the effort by identifying the best plants that can be grown in space. While transporting entire crops may take up too much space, and prove uneconomical, seeds are small and can be transported easily. NASA plans to use robots to take care of the crops, which leaves the astronauts free for more critical tasks.

Apart from local extraction, fuel can also be obtained from waste. A Trash Reactor can be used on Mars to convert garbage generated by the astronauts into valuable elements. The trash reactor at the Kennedy Space Center burns garbage at a temperature of 537 degrees Celsius to convert garbage into fuel, with oxygen and water as by products. The current reactor can covert four and a half kg of garbage into a little over three kg of fuel. Annie Meier, a chemical engineer at the Kennedy Space Center said “There is food waste, there is biological waste, there is packaging waste. Here at Kennedy, we’re working on how to make this waste into useful products, such as methane for fuel.”

NASA’s plans and efforts for using local resources on Mars are extensive and detailed. Similar to SpaceX, NASA wants to go beyond just Mars. “We don’t just want to go explore,” Bob Cabana said, “we want to pioneer; we want to establish a presence in the solar system.”