Mars One: Humanity's Next Great Adventure: Inside the First Human Settlement on Mars
304
Mars One: Humanity's Next Great Adventure: Inside the First Human Settlement on Mars
304eBook
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Overview
The next step in our great adventure is putting humans on Mars, but what will it really take to achieve this?
In 2011, Mars One announced its intentions to establish a permanent human settlement on Mars beginning as early as 2024; in 2013 it launched its astronaut-selection program and received thousands of applications. The highly anticipated Mars One documentary series will provide a window into the captivating details of the crew selection and training process, allowing the whole world to follow along as Mars' first settlers prepare for their mission.
Now, with Mars One: Humanity's Next Great Adventure, you can step even further inside the experience of these astronaut pioneers and explore the various human dimensions of Mars One's planned expeditions. Edited by Norbert Kraft, MD, Mars One's Chief Medical Officer and head of crew selection and training, as well as crew selection and training committee members James R. Kass, PhD, and Raye Kass, PhD, this collection of essays from scientists, psychologists, and more provides a behind-the-scenes look at the process and criteria used to choose candidates, fascinating details about what they'll learn, and predictions about their future lives on Mars.
Inside, you'll find in-depth discussions of:
The essential skills and training the Mars One astronauts will need to journey to and then survive on Mars, from technical and medical know-how to the interpersonal skills necessary for working in confined quarters so far from home
The challenges of going through the selection and training process while being watched by millions around the world, and what Mars One hopes watching the process will mean for viewers at home
Inside information, including images, on the planned Mars One habitats and colonization timeline
What settlers can expect on Mars, from daily work activities in a hostile environment to communication with Earth and options for leisure time
The book also includes excerpts from candidate questionnaires, allowing readers to enter the minds of prospective Martians like never before.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781940363936 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | BenBella Books, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 02/23/2016 |
| Sold by: | Penguin Random House Publisher Services |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
He has over 20 years of experience in aviation and aerospace research and development. His primary area of expertise is developing physiological and psychological countermeasures to combat the negative effects of long-duration spaceflight. Dr. Kraft's experiences span Europe, Asia, and the United States, where he has worked for several international space agencies, including the Russian Space Agency and the Japanese Space Agency. Dr. Kraft is an author of over 40 papers in the field of aerospace medicine, including a seminal paper on intercultural crew issues in long-duration spaceflight. He has an M.D. from University of Vienna, Austria, and is a Fellow of the Aerospace Medical Association.
Dr. James R. Kass has been working in the field of human spaceflight for more than 30 years. He was an investigator on the first Spacelab mission in the early 80s in the field of neurophysiology. In the decade following, he gained industrial experience at several aerospace companies in Germany, before joining the European Space Agency at its research and technology centre, ESTEC, in the Netherlands.
Dr. Kass has trained astronauts and worked on the ground operations teams for several Spacelab /Space Shuttle and MIR missions (including the tragic STS-107), with crews from Russia, USA, Middle and Far East, and several European countries. He has also worked with cosmonauts of the former Salyut space station and astronauts of the first US space station, Skylab. He has participated as scientist and reviewer in several isolation experiments investigating psychology of long-duration isolation, as one will certainly encounter on Mars.
Dr. Raye Kass, Professor of Applied Human Sciences at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada, currently spearheads group theory courses in both the undergraduate and graduate level. Dr. Kass has been highlighted frequently by both national and international press agencies for both her space sciences and group theory research. Dr. Kass has also been invited to be involved in numerous space research projects in conjunction with the Canadian Space Agency and NASA, including the Psychological Experiment / Training Programme for the CAPSULS Mission held in Canada, the SFINCCS mission held in Russia, and the NSBRI (National Space Biomedical Research Institute) Ground-based Research Project with the NASA Ames Research Centre in the USA.
Dr. Kass is the author of Theories of Small Group Development, as well as the coauthor of three other books on group theory.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
What technical skills will the crew need to survive and ultimately thrive on Mars?
IMPROVISATION AND EXPLORATION
MASON PECK
Explorers of Mars will need many technical skills, not to mention training on how to operate technologies chosen to take them to the surface of that world and keep them alive there. Human exploration of Mars will require people adept at handling electrical and electronic systems, including generators, computers, communications systems and sensors; people who can repair life support systems and keep the air breathable, the water drinkable, and temperature comfortable; people who can survey sites and construct the habitats in which the explorers will live out the bulk of their lives.
But there is one technical skill that is more important than any other and that we can predict will be needed in abundance even without knowing all of the technical requirements of the mission: the ability to improvise.
Human settlement of Mars will likely be conducted in a way that astronauts of the last fifty years would find unfamiliar. From the pioneers of the American Mercury and Soviet Vostok programs to the scientists and sojourners on the International Space Station, astronauts follow carefully scripted procedures that safely plan their extravehicular activities and scientific investigations. And that's perfectly appropriate — for now. In the decades to come, we should expect our natural creativity, resourcefulness, and adventurousness to determine how we make the farther reaches of the cosmos our own, as our ancestors did when they left Africa tens of thousands of years ago. We will once again improvise solutions to problems we can't even yet imagine.
Certainly improvisation has played a role in space exploration. Some of us remember the Apollo 13 mission. Probably more of us remember the movie. At one point the three astronauts, Fred Haise, Jack Swigert, and Jim Lovell, moved into the Lunar Module to conserve power, saving what little the Command Module had left for Earth atmosphere reentry. But with three astronauts in that small space, carbon dioxide built up too quickly. They needed more lithium hydroxide canisters to remove it. They could not simply use the canisters from the Command Module, which no longer needed them. Those were square, and the Lunar Module used round ones. Engineers had to improvise an adapter to allow the square lithium hydroxide canisters from the Command Module to interface with the round environmental system on the Lunar Module. The fix required tape, cardboard, and plastic bags. That's all it took to put a square peg in a round hole. It was one of many unconventional solutions that ultimately saved the lives of the Apollo 13 astronauts.
And Apollo 13 is not the only example of improvisation in space. I've been involved in a number of so-called anomaly resolution efforts over the years — getting a spacecraft's deployable components, such as solar panels or antennas, unstuck from their cramped launch configuration by commanding unusual maneuvers; uploading some new software to allow a spacecraft with a broken appendage to continue to point at the Earth; and others I can't even mention because they're trade secrets.
I've seen unmanned spacecraft saved by all sorts of improvised solutions. In 1998, some of my colleagues at Hughes Space and Communications rescued the AsiaSat-3 spacecraft (later renamed PAS-22) after the launch vehicle had failed to insert it into a high enough orbit. Jerry Salvatore, Cesar Ocampo, and many others sent it to a geostationary orbit the short way — around the moon. Changing the plane of the orbit required less propellant that far away from Earth. It was the first commercial communications satellite to make that trip. It arrived in geosynchronous orbit with enough fuel to provide telecommunications services. I remember my colleague John Haskell calculating (by hand) carefully timed thruster commands to a spacecraft (one I won't name) to keep it from tipping over while we scrambled to plan an unanticipated orbit-raising burn. He got it right every time.
Anomaly means "something that's not the same." It's an unexpected turn of events. I suppose it's a euphemism, a nice neutral word in place of "screw-up," a more direct term that encourages us to point a finger at a scapegoat. A friend of mine once typed the letter O instead of the number 0 when he was sending a command to a spacecraft. It wasn't his fault, but that simple difference caused a severe screw-up — I mean an anomaly — that nearly destroyed the spacecraft. The littlest things can cause problems.
One reason these anomalies cause consternation is that we typically can't go fix spacecraft when they fail. NASA's shuttle missions to repair the Hubble Space Telescope are unusual exceptions, costing more than half a billion dollars each time. In most other cases, that cost isn't justified. It might be cheaper to launch a new spacecraft, and in any case a new spacecraft will last longer and include better features. So, satellite servicing has not caught on yet. Companies like ITT Exelis and ATK are working on new ways to achieve satellite servicing, but a viable business case will demand an innovative approach to reducing the cost. Even if satellite servicing does become a financially viable enterprise in the years to come, we're not likely to see routine service missions to Mars for a very long time.
So, we aerospace engineers plan ahead, trying to think of all the reasons why a space system might fail, and all this planning costs a lot of money. It also makes us quite risk averse. When we do encounter anomalies, the heart beats faster, reputations are called into question, and so on. We have learned to avoid them, taking the easy and conservative, if expensive, way out.
We incorporate redundancy and backup systems. We rehearse procedures that might be needed. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has a "Mars Yard," where a rover encounters all manner of obstacles and inhospitable conditions. Spacecraft operators must get the rover out of trouble, using only the existing commands at their disposal, honing their experience in using the hardware and the established operating procedures.
We do all that, but failures still happen, often because of something no one thought of. After all, if they had thought of it, the fix would already be in place. Despite all our risk aversion, our efforts at building fail-safe space systems, and rigorous verification of everything before launch, what makes spacecraft work today is that human element — the creativity and innovation that we see in successful problem-solvers from all walks of life.
Improvisation and in-flight repairs occurred often in the Russian space station program that ran from the 1970s to 1990s and was somewhat baked into mission thinking. For example, during the Soyuz TM-32 mission, astronauts fixed a video recorder with a soldering iron. True stories like this one from the Soviet era have inspired urban legends about space, including one you've probably heard: NASA is alleged to have spent millions to develop a space pen, while the Soviets gave their cosmonauts pencils. The truth is more prosaic: The Fisher Pen company had already invested its own money to develop a very robust design that also worked in space. So, NASA adopted it. And it's not that NASA didn't consider pencils. They did provide mechanical pencils to astronauts early on, but the danger of bits of carbon flaking off and drifting into electronics, as well as their flammability (remember the Apollo 1 fire), made them consider pens to be the better option. Still, this tale of simplicity and cleverness besting a government bureaucracy retains its appeal, and the story continues to circulate.
Here's a story of Russian technological improvisation with a greater likelihood of truth — although I must admit, I have not been able to verify it. Long ago, before NASA had ever docked the space shuttle to the Soviet space station Mir the Soviets were in a meeting with NASA space-station engineers discussing how such a maneuver would take place. NASA asked for vibration models of Mir, which are typically created as computer simulations that represent all the subtle structural behaviors of a spacecraft. The Soviets said that they did not have such models but could get some results soon. A short time later, they returned to NASA with beautiful, realistic charts showing the vibration response of Mir. NASA engineers were impressed that they could assemble a detailed computer model so quickly. The Soviets explained that they didn't model anything. They asked a cosmonaut to jump up and down at a specific frequency, and they simply measured the resulting vibrations.
Creativity and innovation is unavoidable in the context of an undertaking like Mars One. In fact, it will be central to making it work. Mars One colonists will certainly bring supplies from Earth, some unexpectedly useful and some unexpectedly useless. Some may be sent later. But what we can expect is that they will have to come up with many of their own ways to survive, and even thrive, on Mars. Ways to repair and improve their equipment, create an economy, new survival techniques, how to supplement their diets with minerals from Martian soil, ways to communicate with the folks at home, and even new ways to create art.
Many journalists seem to have a hard time distinguishing between science and technology. We hear "NASA scientists have built a new spacecraft ..." No, they didn't. Engineers did that. Technology is creation, building, and innovation. Science is hypothesis, inquiry, and discovery. Both are distinctly human endeavors, traits that set us apart and make us proud to be who we are. But it's not science that will help a Mars One colonist put square filters into round holes. It's technology.
Technical problem-solving is what makes exploration possible. Informed by science, technology departs from merely understanding the nature of the world to create what has never been built before. Problem-solving skills of the type Mars One colonists will need come from making things, building them. These are the skills we associate today with the DIY spirit, whether it's from writing your own video game software, building your own car, or 3-D printing your own eyeglasses. Mars One candidates with the instinct to build, repair, create, and improve — they're the ones with the indispensable skills that will keep a colony alive and establish a permanent human presence on another planet.
A successful Mars One candidate isn't suspicious or intimidated by technology. In fact, he or she embraces opportunities to get physical with electronic circuits, mechanisms, and computers. Merely understanding abstractly how something works is a lot less valuable than being able to fix it and even build something better to replace it. Not all of these skills come from formal education. I can think of many engineering graduates I'd never let near a spacecraft. Instead, a Mars colonist is someone who is always learning new things and is eager to put that knowledge into practice.
One such engineer saved my father's life. About sixty years ago he was at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida, flying a Beechcraft military trainer known as the T-6 (or SNJ, in the Navy). After takeoff, his landing gear retracted, but the control handle for the gear stripped off; he wouldn't be able to lower the gear when it was time to land. These SNJ aircraft had been around for a long time, and a team of engineers were occupied full-time at Pensacola in those days to keep them running. One of the engineers got on the radio and walked him through a solution: remove the panel down by his feet (it required a Dzus key, but he used a coin), and loosen a nut that connects the landing gear to the control lever. With the gear free to move, my father rolled the aircraft back and forth as quickly as possible to shake the landing gear down into place. Another aircraft flew up underneath his and determined that the landing gear was "probably" locked. He landed easily, disappointing those fellow cadets who had hoped to see something more exciting that afternoon.
Such engineering know-how, preceded by years of engineers "designing out" failures, is key to the success of the Mars One colony. Hardware and software will be conceived, designed, tested, and implemented well in advance of the first boots on Mars. But every formal engineering discipline will also come into play during the daily lives of colonists on Mars: Civil, environmental, biomedical, mechanical, electrical, chemical, aerospace, and software engineering will all matter. So will the meta-discipline of systems engineering, which is concerned with the architecture and interfaces among parts of a large, complex system, such as a Mars habitat or an Earth-return vehicle. Here are a few reasons why they will come into play:
• We'll need civil engineers to implement the earthworks that will maintain a habitat's temperature and shield Mars One colonists from high-energy particles and ultraviolet radiation, particularly when the Martian regolith doesn't pile up the way we thought it would.
• Environmental engineers will figure out ways to keep the colonists supplied with water and air from the environment, when it turns out to be easier or harder than expected, all sustainably.
• Biomedical engineers will devise ways to create splints, eyeglasses, stents, prosthetics, casts, protective gear, and other devices that will become necessary as usage, injuries, or unexpected medical conditions exhaust the supplies that came from Earth.
• Chemical engineers will know how to adapt smelting techniques to the local conditions, allowing the colonists to extract materials from the environment without needing to bring special-purpose equipment with them.
• Electrical engineers will repair, redesign, and create new circuitry to keep the colony functioning and make sure it doesn't fall too far behind the pace of technological innovation back on Earth.
• Aerospace engineers will track incoming spacecraft, build rockets for Earth return, and address unexpected problems that the Martian winds and dust storms cause.
• Software engineers will create new apps for the computing needs of the colonists, such as geolocation tools, games, and communications; and they will evolve the software that came to Mars originally, patching it with new code from Earth or of their own devising.
A lot of people with this spirit are already building their own spacecraft, and I can speak to that special group in particular. These days it's common for aerospace engineering programs in the United States to include a do-it-yourself spacecraft. College seniors launch their class projects. During my years at Cornell University, my students have built four small spacecraft, with three more on the way. But even some high school students are gaining space experience: Students at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology near Washington, DC, launched a grapefruit-size spacecraft that sent text messages back to Earth in 2013. In fact, this kind of small spacecraft is the most commonly launched type of satellite today.
These exciting trends in technology have us all thinking about the future of space and our place in it. Entrepreneurial space companies are building rockets, earth-observation satellites, satellite-servicing platforms, and asteroid-mining robots. In addition to Mars One, there are private plans to send people into orbit, to the moon, and to Mars in the coming decade, most of which will likely happen with the support of venture capital, not the more familiar government funding. At the same time, NASA is rediscovering its innovation roots, sponsoring the development of new technologies to push the boundaries of science and exploration. Add to the mix that individuals — members of the so-called maker movement — are passionately taking ownership of technology development, and we find that using 3-D printers and other cutting-edge additive-manufacturing technologies can accelerate the pace of putting hardware into orbit for commercial purposes.
In this new world, universities use spacecraft systems-engineering methods that are borrowed from the rapid development cycle of consumer electronics in order to reject decades-old principles that currently drive costs and schedules for spacecraft engineering. We can personalize exploration to produce research results with broad intellectual and societal impact that will change the face of our planet and beyond if we embrace the opportunities that small, agile space projects bring. Today's students have taken control of the means of producing space systems. Theirs will be a new generation with new design principles for personal spacecraft, using in-space resources to build exploration infrastructure across the solar system, and even benefitting from crowdsourcing to help them explore in ways we have never done before.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Mars One Humanity's Next Great Adventure"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Mars One.
Excerpted by permission of BenBella Books, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Foreword,
Introduction,
Technical and Medical Skills, Health and Fitness,
What technical skills will the crew need to survive and ultimately thrive on Mars? Improvisation and Exploration Mason Peck,
What medical skills will the crew need to survive and ultimately thrive on Mars? Medical Skills for an Interplanetary Trip Thais Russomano,
What health and fitness skills will the crew need to survive and ultimately thrive on Mars?,
Human Health and Performance for Mars Missions Jamie R. Guined,
Culture, Cohesion, and Compatibility,
What role do interpersonal and group skills play for the settlers on Mars? A World Waiting to Be Born Raye Kass,
What role does cultural background play for the settlers on Mars? Culture and Communication Andy Tamas,
What role does age play for the settlers on Mars? Age and Aging on Mars Mars 100,
What role does gender play for the settlers on Mars? Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Mars Ronit Kark,
With The Whole World Watching,
What is the impact on participants of filming the crew selection and training process? The (Amazing) Reality of Being on TV Cindy Chiang Halvorsen,
What is the desired impact on viewers of filming the crew selection and training process? How Filming Mars One Could Change the World James R. Kass,
Inside the Minds of the Mars 100,
Life On Mars,
What are the political and legal complexities of colonizing Mars? The Politics and Law of Settling Mars Narayan Prasad,
What will living conditions and quality of life be like on Mars? To Build a Bicycle Vincent Hyman,
What will leisure time be like on Mars? A Canvas as Big as a World Robert T. Jeschonek,
The Mars One Mission Timeline,
The Mars One Selection Process,
Endnotes,
About the Editors,