You need a combination of imagination and practical actions to define and reach goals. Those goals don't have to be perfect. Often a near miss is sufficient.
It doesn't take a miracle to go from imagination to reality. It just takes actions which are never completely defined. So it's a serious insult to insinuate that Mars One is imaginary spaceflight.
Then Joel completely misses the obvious with, "Very spacious, modern, and most of all, clean." He focuses on clean as if the presentation should show the normal clutter of a lived in space. Why didn't he catch the more obvious, "This is where they are staying the rest of their lives."
No. They. Will. Not.
This is one of the problems with the Mars One plan. But this is fixable. Mars One is doing a lot of things entirely right because they are looking at what already exists rather than what they'd like to exist. They have talked with companies that already make the things for which they see the need. But they don't see everything which means before they send anyone some of those blind spots need to be made visible. Slandering them doesn't accomplish that.
Yes, dust will have to be dealt with, but let's not treat it as if it was a bridge too far. Dust can cause illness and even death on earth (berylliosis) but we deal with it. We will deal with it on mars. He sums up with, "visionaries never have PowerPoint slides showing astronauts scrubbing filters."
Guess what? He's one of the visionaries and he's pointed out a problem. That's the first step in fixing it. Nothing that works is pristine. It just has to work enough to do it's job. They have limited space on the I.S.S. to fix such things. They do not have limited space on mars if they simply provide a way to make more habitable space. They don't have to scrub filters if they make them right. Perhaps with a water bubble bath? Then you just change the water when needed (or put some fish or snails or whatever to do it for ya?) Whatever the solution requires.
Mars does not require the SLS. ...or many other showstoppers that aren't.
We need visionaries. Visionaries with money are especially helpful. We don't absolutely need naysayers, but they can be useful in keeping people honest.
2 comments:
Okay, yes, dust is an issue, but Martian dust is much easier to deal with than the lunar kind, due to weather making the fines less sharp.
A further point on Mars dust; at least a large fraction (it varies, plus we don't really know the chemical makeup with precision)is iron oxide. You don't need to filter that; you have a simple magnet as the first stage of your air cleaner.
Regarding air cleaners; why have filters at all? All you need to do is clean the air, and on ISS, filters make sense. On Mars, why not do it the easy way by utilizing other things you're doing anyway, such as growing plants? One of the best ways to filter air is by using moist soil, so simply injecting it under the growing medium over a fairly wide area would filter it very nicely - assuming there's nothing in it that's persistent and toxic that can't be neutralized. Or, use plain old damp sand and run air through it - that makes a great dust filter.
Air locks are another issue, but to me this begs the question; why use them at all, at least for most excursions? It doesn't make sense to me to put on a spacesuit inside, then go outside, then come back inside, bringing dust with you. Better to keep the suit outside and enter it via a port in the back. That way, the dust outside stays outside.
As for the complaint that the slides show unrealistically tidy quarters, I have to wonder if the guy has ever seen model homes? (Including the landscaping in front of the garage door, where the driveway has to go in a real house). Unrealistic presentation is hardly limited to space. :)
Arizona CJ
Working the problem directly will make it pretty easy to deal with I'm sure.
BTW, did you see the blog editor invite I sent you yesterday? It shows pending here.
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