Dick Eagleson: Anent using Antarctica vs the fake “Mars Lab” simulations, we agree completely.

To the extent Antarctic research stations have any relevance to Mars settlement it’s mostly in the psychological dynamic of the participants. The people in Antarctica are there to do real work that has some consequence – at least to the researchers. What they’re doing is real to them. And they are not able to leave at a moment’s notice. Both will also be true in spades of early Mars settlers.

I think it is not so true of those “Mars hab” simulation projects that are basically exercises in LARPing for participants. At some level, they know it’s all fake and that they can pull the “emergency stop” any time they want to.

Dick Eagleson wrote, “There’s not really anyplace on Earth that is a reasonable facsimile of Mars.”

Actually, I think Antarctica and the Arctic archipelago are very reasonable facsimiles of Mars. They are very cold, very dry (except for tons of ice). The gravity and atmosphere are different of course, but that can’t be helped.

In fact, I’ve noted this before, but the research stations in Antarctica have provided a lot of lessons that can be applied to Mars.

At the same time, I agree that a lot of money and effort has been wasted on “hab projects” where people make believe they are living in a Mars habitat for months. This work has uses, but usually its value has been greatly overstated.

Not exactly. Zubrin spent so much time figuring out how to get to Mars at miniscule scale on the cheap using repurposed legacy hardware that he fell into the trap of regarding that as the ‘right’ way to do things. He seems resentful, now, that Elon – who will most likely be the world’s first trillionaire by the time the first human expedition to Mars departs LEO – is going to be able to go to Mars at scale with bespoke gear.

Jeff Wright,

The proprietor of that channel has a tendency to get too far out over his skis on a regular basis. SpaceX has already bent metal for the upper third of the first HLS Starship so I don’t see any sawed-off version being a way to save time at this point. What would most consequentially speed up the Artemis 3 schedule is for SpaceX to build a Starship-based replacement for SLS-Orion and launch the crew on that. It, and the HLS Starship could refill from separate depot ships in LEO, then head Moonward together, docking on the way and eliminating any otherwise required waiting around in lunar orbit, as would need to be done for Orion, and also allowing their separation and reconnection to take place in a much lower lunar orbit.

TallDave,

Yeah, I suspect going in and out of Martian hab airlocks is likely to resemble walking through a car wash. The habs will definitely need mud rooms.

There’s not really anyplace on Earth that is a reasonable facsimile of Mars. A number of “Mars analog” hab projects have been done, but I don’t think any have been worth much in terms of lessons learned.

The SpaceX plan seems very much to be to send a bunch of Optimus bots on the first expedition. They won’t be able to make Mars “livable,” exactly, but they can certainly do a lot of useful prep work prior to later arrival of humans.

Fusion generators, fission reactors, windmills, solar arrays – preferably all of the above.

maybe we should build a practice colony in the actual Antarctica?

send the Optimus bots to make it livable first, generate interest with funny robot hijinks video

anyways let’s hope we’re shipping fusion generators to Mars in five years