SpaceX Mars Colonization!! Can we REALLY Build Habitats on Mars Exploration Zones?? -In details

SpaceX Mars Colonization!! Can we REALLY Build Habitats on Mars Exploration Zones?? -In details

Hello friends,
Welcome back to another episode by Engineering Today and hope you’re all having a great time. As Starship prepares for IFT 2, we have taken the opportunity to explore the future and delve into the pivotal role this world's most powerful rocket will play in the advancement of humanity's space endeavors like Mars colonization. And now, we have an exciting and exclusive update to share with you.

We know that SpaceX envisions a future where human colonization on Mars becomes a reality. Elon Musk has set his sights on Mars colonization, and he's not afraid to dream big. While Musk's artist illustrations of "Mars Base Alpha" depict a complex network of buildings and infrastructure, SpaceX's initial plans for the Red Planet are more focused and practical.

HUGE THANKS TO:

AUDIO:

To be resolved, thank you.

[MARS-me]

The challenges of building habitats on Mars are immense, but the potential rewards are even greater. We've actually added colonists to our game, so you can get a taste of what living on Mars might be like. Pretty cool, right?

[RussW_Comments]

Recommend adding an option that repurposes Starships (including oxygen and methane tanks) as a building. This maximizes mass transfer to Mars, with the engines being the main mass waste. (Of course, they could be detached for reuse and stockpiled.) This would provide a 9mX50m building ... a lot of space.

[antonnym]

Noctis Labyrinthus is ideal because it's in the extreme western end of Valles Marineris and near the equator with a giant relict glacier (dust-covered) which is recipe-ready for extracting water. The Valles is 7km/4mi. deep there, so the air pressure is as good as you'll get outside of the Hellas basin (8km/5mi deep). Not only do the valley walls provide good radiation protection, but you get the thicker air and the warmer equatorial climate, too. (At this pressure, water can exist in a liquid state from 0° to 10°C or 32 to 50°F.) Additionally, the relative proximity of the Tharsis region with all it's skylights and lava tubes which are also good candidates for habitation. Very nice reporting! All good wishes.

[johnstewart]

There are many volunteers willing to make a one way trip to Mars. Crews returning to Earth requires significant technology

[johncollier]

This is amazing i cannot believe ive lived long enough to see colonization of mars, i knew it would happen again....

[RussW_Comments]

Seems prudent that we should land a Starship on Mars whose cargo is enough fuel to fuel another crewed Starship to get that Starship back to orbit where it can refuel and get back to Earth or to orbiting "MarsStation" in orbit.

[JosueC]

If we can make a satellite constellation such as Starlink, doing the same on Mars could be possible but also equipping the satellites with an electromagnetic shield projector thus the sum of all the satellites would make for a planetary shield to protect it from radiation so we could eventually terraform Mars. Maybe the idea is too advanced for now, but maybe in the future it will be possible.

[gravityawsome]

A future so bright you can barely see it.

[PlanXV]

Can make a tent from a parachute 😮 with fire 🔥 and wood floors 😊

[maiskk]

Achieve this in Antarctica then, try it on the Moon and then we can talk ...

[ChaJ]

There are many places you can try to stick an inflatable habitat, but I don't think they will really shine at all tasks. I think one thing missed here is the ability to have inflatable hangers / workshops for building bigger things in space. While you take time to address radiation shielding, I think the place these will really shine is in LEO where the Earth provides some protection already. If you really want good radiation shielding, you start to lose the advantages of inflatable habitats.

Here is the thing. You look at Starship and really its big thing is going to be getting into LEO effectively. We use chemical propulsion to get into space from Earth because it is the only thing that we have succeeded at doing the job so far to date. I am not saying it will be the only thing ever, but Starship is a major overhaul of chemical propulsion likely leading to the penultimate state of rocketry into LEO. However, space extends far beyond LEO. It turns out we have other ways to get beyond LEO than chemical rockets and many of those ways are a lot better than chemical rockets. So while some my say, stick Starship everywhere because it can get into space, well the natural order of things is to try, fail, and scale back on this tech as other technologies prove to be better suited for the task. I think the thing a lot of people don't understand is just how hard of a problem it is to go into space and then move around space, especially if say you want to move people around quickly and especially if you want to be able to return to Earth. You try this with chemical and either you don't make it because you can't figure out a way to get the acceleration you need to do the job or you make it a one way trip in very cramped corridors because it took an insane amount of propellant and rocket engines and multiple stages / piles of expensive rocket launches to do it at all for that cramped, no frills one way trip. What it would actually take to make it back to Earth is just out of reach when it was so insanely inefficient and so close to the edge of not being doable at all to go just one way. At this over 50 years after reaching the Moon in a cramped 2 person capsule after blasting off in a 33 ft wide giant flying skyscraper of a rocket, we are still a ways away from attempting to land people on Mars due in large part to the problems of trying to do it with chemical propulsion. So no, I don't see Starship as the answer to going to Mars even with orbital refueling. I see more advanced space based propulsion, which we have many options to choose from, as the answer.

So moving more back to what you will use on Mars, at best maybe the inflatable habitat is an airtight "inner tube" that can be made and tested on Earth and then an "outer tire" will be built on Mars around it to protect you as you touch on. It doesn't really make sense to try to build a lot of protection into an inflatable habitat as at the very least this is a lot of mass to haul around. The big thing an inflatable habitat is going to shine at is providing a lot of space that is airtight without consuming a lot of space and mass inside of a rocket. I see this more of a stepping stone as you are going to start with basically nothing on Mars beyond what flies on those initial rockets and definitely not the tools nor human expertise to be building airtight structures on Mars. Everything that cannot be autonomously constructed by the initial robots sent to Mars is going to have to be built and tested on Earth and validated for human use before being shipped to Mars. Otherwise all you got is the near vacuum of the surface of Mars to work with, which is instant death.

If you can get a sizable human presence on Mars to the point where you can gather the resources in-situ and build airtight structures, I think the big thing are going to be cylindrical towers, especially wide ones that somewhat minimize surface area. Here is the thing with this. How many people live underground, at least outside of the war zone of Ukraine? Nobody. That is terrible for human mental health. Even the first American astronauts vetoed the first space capsules and refused to ride them until the engineers went back to the drawing board and designed windows into the capsules. I think the same is going to hold for telling people to live underground on Mars because "it is safer". No, people are not going to do that. So, as you start building bigger structures on Mars, the natural thing to do, especially with 1/3rd of Earth's gravity, is to do something we do a lot here on Earth, build up into skyscrapers. The thing with skyscrapers on Earth is everyone wants a nice view and you can get spectacular views from a skyscraper. However, on Earth you are not worried about pressurization and the towers are not designed for self sustaining human life. Instead everything flows in and out of the skyscraper in terms of supporting human life and the skyscrapers are thin so everyone can have a view. On Mars, that pressurized cylinder is going to have thick shielding around it, it is going to have all of this support stuff in there, including things like vertical warehouse farms that run on a bunch of grow lights as that is far more effective than say having a glass dome that is heavily shielded on top and thus little light makes it through the thick shielding, and it is going to have other life support systems in it that don't actually need any windows. So then you have people living and working more along the outer shell of the cylinder with windows looking out to the Martian landscape and then this big interior space with everything you need to sustain life inside of that structure. In other words, basically a fat cylinder. This is what I come up with for the preferred way to live on Mars. Granted, maybe you stick a glass dome on top and put a park there so people can "got outside and sunbath" or "play at the park" or what have you, but that would be the real use of a glass dome, mental health and quality of life, not "I am trying to grow food here" because the latter is just much better done indoors with grow lights.

[hotrodandrube]

The boring company's tunneling rigs will fit within the starship, and tunneling on Mars will provide the compressed lego building bricks showcased years ago.

[IvanPlayStationLiFe]

Hows the segment going to work in Mars

[frankallen]

If nasa isn't doing it then no way in hell I'm trusting a business

[NicholasNerios]

Sierra space bought out Bigelow when he went bankrupt.

And the latest test shows it'll hold an internal pressure of 73psi more then double NASA requirements. It'll be easy to simulate the Earth's14.5 psi atmosphere on Mars in inflatable habitats.

[duncanbedford]

Gosh, if Mars had Air, fertile soil, adequate sunlight, and wasn't blasted by radiation, dust storms and a climate that wasn't minus 100 degrees.. I still wouldn't go there!!😂😂😂

[maark]

Some of the news on this channel can Occasionally B 3RD OR 12TH Hand..
But i still Watch anyway. . this Narrator ..i don't mind at all.
BUT Everytime i hear his voice..it invokes the Memory of the: Seinfeld EP: (The Rabbi with loose lips) oh Elaine..

[qweezinator]

If we want to thrive on mars we need to sadly pollute it, we need to make ships that are powered by nuclear so by the time we land we'll have a strong power source on the planet including if something goes wrong. By the time we start mining the ice caps we can start using hydrogen to heat and power as we start expanding. We also need to combine video game consoles with hyper simulated computing to run simulations and to keep the martians sane

[jackhemphill]

We should first build some test habitats out near death valley, and have people live in them, grow food, recycle, and see how that works out after a year or two..

[darktower]

Can we REALLY build Mars habitats? Of course we can. We can also die tragically and slowly on live TV. Any person or corporation that doesn't build a torus space station first is doomed in my opinion. Give the astronauts the simulated Earth gravity and a TON of problems disappear. A Stanford torus station (a la Gateway LLC's lofty ideals) can be stationed in stationary orbit around Mars. Dropships can carry scientists or colonists down to the surface and then back. Staying ON the surface would present problems quickly. An orbiting station would largely mitigate the 240-300 mSv radiation they'd accumulate on the planet. Lowered operational costs (a la Space X and private commercial groups) could increase the rotation OUT of Mars contracts.... like pilots being limited by increased exposure to radiation... the Mars orbiters and colonists would just rotate out. The biggest concern I have is the time frame in which Elon plans to achieve so many of the things he aims at. I get the feeling he's all too aware of his own mortality and short lifespan. He wants to achieve this before he dies.... that means 2040ish.... anything beyond that and it'll be too close or he'll be too far removed from the industry to be credited with it.