Life Force Mars
Creating a New Home for Mankind
by
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NASA Administrator Dave Bagnal and Project Director Gus Hoover from NASA were meeting with President Sorley and his advisors to allay Sorley’s concern that new discoveries were pointing toward a manned flight to Mars. Sorley came directly to the point.
“Do you see humans actually living on Mars in the foreseeable future?”
“That is a distinct possibility, again assuming our projects are successful. Whether to do that and when is another matter. If that is to be done economically it will depend on whether we accept certain conditions.”
The President had a glimmer of hope. “Such as?”
“Those we send to Mars must not expect to return to Earth for a considerable time. Perhaps some will not return at all. This is a bootstrap project.
“The greater cost of conventional concepts would be to get people back up into Mars orbit and transported back to Earth. We have been sending instrument packages to the surface of Mars since 1969. We have yet to bring anything back. We would not do that now.”
“Ouch! I don’t imagine there is much chance of getting anyone to go who we would want on Mars.”
“Maybe yes, maybe no. We actually have four highly trained scientists now who have been working on the project and seem very interested. We have not made them an offer.”
Allen Wilson, the National Science Advisor, chose this point to change the subject.
“What is this habitat going to be like?”
“You’ve heard us refer to a meteor impact crater near our fossae landing site. It’s about the size of Meteor Crater east of Flagstaff, Arizona. Our plan is to dig passageways and rooms inside the wall of the Mars crater, which we call Genesis. These would be lined with solid stone arches and domes that we create using Mars resources. The power plant is critical as well as chemical and physical processes that distill pure water, extract pure carbon dioxide from the air, and combine to provide atmosphere for breathing and fuel for internal combustion engines, mainly for construction. There would be biosphere space in the habitat, chambers for humans to occupy, and industrial facilities that must be developed.”
The President rejoined the conversation. “You make this sound so simple. Is it safe for humans to go?”
“Sir, nothing is safe in space or on a nearly airless world colder than the arctic. On the other hand the base is deep underground in the crater wall and as solid a place as we can build. Mars doesn’t have earthquakes or violent weather.”
Gus took a daring leap. “We have given you only an outline, a concept. As it stands now, without any modification, our plan is doomed to failure.”
“Wait a minute. You have been telling us how this miracle of interplanetary colonization is almost within reach. Which way is it?”
“Our understanding of the natural world has grown enormously in recent decades because we are capable of organizing and reasoning and making conceptual leaps that are ever more sophisticated. That new force is changing the natural world in many, very unanticipated ways. That is just the way our world works today… our intellect leads us. When we began the Apollo project no one dreamed of the many technical problems to be solved much less their solutions.
“We do not foresee any insurmountable technical problems that would prevent us from colonizing Mars. But let me illustrate. Why has no one come up with this approach before? It appears so obvious now. The answer is that we were bound up by our assumptions. We are now thinking outside of that box.”
Sorley was pragmatic. He wanted to pin down some obvious tasks. “So how do you house these colonists for such a long time?”
“We burrow into the wall of that nearby impact crater you see in the photograph. We fuse rock solid floors, walls and ceilings using a thermite mixture we call marscrete. Thermite is only a mixture of iron oxide like powdered rust and finely ground aluminum powder. We’ve been experimenting with this approach for over four years. It works very well.
“We can produce fuel, a breathable atmosphere, aluminum metal, and structural rock. We would enclose a space for hydroponics growth of food plants and another to house additional small animals such as chickens and tilapia on the first mission.”
“Why send people at all if you can do so well with robots?”
“We humans can solve new problems very rapidly. While robots can learn within reason they cannot deal with surprise situations well… and the inherent radio transmission time from Mars to Earth and back is is an eternity in an emergency. There is no substitute for human adaptability and educated intellect. We would send an astronaut, a construction engineer, a geologist, and a life sciences expert as the first colonists. They would also be two men and two women.”
“And when do you plan to do all of this?”
Dave then smiled broadly. “We could send the unmanned mission in 2016 with an outside chance of being ready for 2014. If all goes well we could send the crew in 2018 with an outside chance of 2016.”
President Sorley was still not done. “What do we really gain by this besides a big adventure for us all?”
“First and foremost we learn how to operate a technological society using only nuclear power produced locally… something we must learn if we are to evolve our society here on Earth with ever more scarce mineral resources.
“We also gain a second home for humanity, a home that has almost as much land surface as we have here on Earth.
“We learn an awful lot about the adaptability of people, animals, plants and microbes.
“We learn from the geological experience of an entirely new world that once had seas and volcanoes and streams and extremes in elevation. And mankind becomes a space faring species.”
“Dr. Bagnal, you certainly come prepared.”
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About the Book
Tim, Joan, Rob and Mary worked for NASA. Using robotics and with JPL support they made site discovery, developed and then traveled to Mars in Ares rockets. They move into an incomplete habitat on Mars that was built with native resources. They then proceed to expand it into a home. They use marscrete thermite-fused building blocks to line excavated tunnels and domed rooms inside of a meteor impact crater similar to Meteor Crater east of Flagstaff , AZ. They assemble a powerful nuclear power plant and convert the thin Mars atmosphere and subterranean water into breathable air and fuel. They carry seed plants and animals to form a biological environment.
Enmeshed in this outline is a dramatic, demanding, adventurous, heart warming, human story of survival in the ultimate harsh environment a hundred million miles from home.
The depicted places and place names and topography and environment of Mars are real. All equipment is realistic. The cosmic environment is real. The characters are all fictional. The time is today.
About the Author
Bert Tucker holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering from West Point (1956) and a master’s degree plus in physics and mathematics from Louisiana State University (1964), including an experimental and theoretical thesis on the fluid dynamics of superfluid liquid helium under a grant from NASA. He was a lieutenant and captain in the Corps of Engineers, engineer company commander (Germany, 1960), airfield operations officer (Fort Polk, 1961–62), and served as an airplane pilot, helicopter pilot, and helicopter instructor pilot. He was an FAA-qualified commercial pilot and was qualified as a military parachutist.
He participated in a course presented by senior NASA instructors on the design of early spacecraft and implementation of the then new Apollo project while he was a graduate student at LSU. No missions have carried men beyond Earth orbit since the Apollo project sent the first men to the moon. For further background, see the acknowledgments.
He worked with and consulted to Wall Street firms for more than a quarter century. He developed and managed the data quality of financial market data systems that employed early global satellite communication systems, acquiring data from one hundred exchanges around the world. He pioneered early derivative securities reporting methodologies. He developed systems to calculate many instantaneous, complex market data indices. He developed encryption methods to secure proprietary market data.
He is a member of the West Point Society of the Mid Hudson Region and was the chair of a series of seven West Point conferences on leadership and ethics development for high school students sponsored by the WPSMHR. He is a member of the Wayne, New Jersey Rotary Club and has served as chair for Rotary District 7490 for ten leadership and ethics conferences sponsored by numerous Rotary Clubs. The seventeen conferences were presented by West Point officers and cadets who were leaders in the West Point Cadet Honor and Respect programs.