What are /r/Colonizemars' favorite Products & Services?

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As someone left of center and an environmentalist.... Free markets and enlightenment values have lifted humanity out of squalor and superstition into modern day lives of plenty and comfort. Check out Steven Pinker's works if you don't believe me.

As long as we bring both to Mars with us, we'll be fine.

Here are the pages from The Case for Mars where Zubrin talks about it. The idea is to take advantage of the high compressive strength of bricks by burying the habitat under enough regolith that the force from the regolith exceeds the force from the air pressure. Then the bricks are being pushed together instead of being pulled apart.

No. TL;DR: "Liability"

Here's the reasoning:

Our simulant is based primarily on Mojave Mars Simulant (MMS), developed by the JPL in 2007 for use in testing the Phoenix and MSL missions. JPL developed MMS for its grain shape and hygroscopic behavior.

JPL research recommends that additives be used to simulate some specific aspects of Martian soil chemistry. We elected not to use those additives for two reasons:

1) Perchlorates have been implicated as a hazardous substance;

2) We are not equipped to handle or to ship hazardous substances.

By using an additive-free version of MMS, we're leaving it up to advanced hobbyists to modify their simulant as they see fit.

FYI, this is the primary reference we've used to develop our simulant. Our supplier uses the same quarry identified in the article:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222127154_Mojave_Mars_simulant-Characterization_of_a_new_geologic_Mars_analog

Concrete has a lot of compressive strength, but because it has low tensile strength you have to get creative to use it to make a habitat. I like Zubrin's idea of buried vaults, described on these pages from The Case for Mars. Other designs are likely possible, but any concrete-base structures will probably have to be buried.

The materials with the best tensile strength (which is needed to contain the pressure in a habitat) are fibers. Some possible choices for fibers on Mars are glass, basalt, carbon, and UHMWPE (although UHMWPE suffers from creep over time). Fibers could be wrapped around a pressure vessel frame (like the one on page 36 of this PowerPoint) and combined with a polymer matrix and maybe an inner liner as well, for a strong pressure vessel using a small amount of material, and from materials that could be made in situ on Mars. The vessels could be used on the surface, buried, or in a lava tube.

If we can get powerful mining or tunneling machines on Mars, and they are able to make tunnels with strong smooth walls, Mars habitat space would be very easy. All you would need to do is seal the ends and then add a thin liner along the tunnel walls. This option would require the least resources for sealing in the space, but I don't know enough about tunneling to know if it's feasible.

Here's a graphic showing the annual solar irradiance at different latitudes on Mars. Higher latitudes also have greater variation in solar energy by season, visible in the first graphic on this page.

Yes: e.g. this paper talks about a small system for using Martian regolith as an emergency source for breathable oxygen. Little water, some enzymes that reduce perchlorate and you're good to go. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242525435_Perchlorate_on_Mars_A_chemical_hazard_and_a_resource_for_humans

Another method is using ethanol as the electron donor, though I suspect (caveat: not my area) that this requires a lot of ethanol to start with.

In the end the optimum solution will probably have several stages, with simple chemical washes, fluidised-bed reactors and settling tanks.

Looks like a Chemical Engineering degree is your ticket to Mars :)

>I would suggest consulting the density and gas properties of Mars' atmosphere to figure out exactly how much convection would help out.

That's pretty well known. Here's a paper on just that. Spoiler: Martian air conducts very little heat.

PDF of study

When you want a non-paywalled pdf, take the title and search it on google scholar. Often it can find one. If it does it will be listed on the right side of the page with a direct link.

Edit (some thoughts):

To paraphrase Elon Musk, there are two ways to terraform Mars, the fast way and the slow way. This strikes me as the very slow way if used alone.

However the fast ways usually seem to focus only on making the atmosphere denser, not making it breathable. This strikes me as a possible first step towards that. So I like it!

Neat! Yeah, to do a watney-scale project will require a good bit of simulant.

> ordering any simulant online will be far too expensive to be feasible.

Probably. You're right that using Orbitech JSC-1, it'll be very expensive. We haven't worked out our final bulk prices, but we will be offering simulant in bulk, and our prices will be much better than Orbitech. It's likely that shipping will cost more than simulant once we're up and running, though. Stay tuned.

> May I ask what's in your simulant to get an idea of what I need to put in my own?

We use crushed Saddleback Basalt from Kern County, CA. Whole rocks go into a crusher that has a vaccuum filter on it, and as the dust is created it's sucked up and collected. It's the same source and method used by the JPL to create Mojave Mars Simulant.

This Reference is what we've been relying on as we developed our blend.

> Calling it a Martian soil simulant is misleading at best.

We're using the exact same source that the JPL used for their Mojave Mars Simulant. If it's good enough for them to refer to it as such, it's good enough for us.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222127154_Mojave_Mars_simulant-Characterization_of_a_new_geologic_Mars_analog

To start with, its not Musk's plan. He said he's looking after the transport logistics part and just outlining ISRU for rocket fuel.

That said, you can check out the name of Paul Wooster <em>[link]</em> who is Principal Mars Development Engineer at SpaceX.

Not to make too fine a point, actually planning a colony is just as much your responsibility as there's!

Just giving my take on this: The people who are making initial plans are mostly city dwellers, and seem to be designing a city. A dense urban structure carries many risks and difficulties including low-grade heat dissipation, sociological risks, spread of fire, plague and other horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Urban concentration also maps badly onto ISRU resource locations. A distributed village structure alleviates all the above problems. There may be an argument for an initial port city not too far from an initial landing zone. But, from there there may be good reasons to tunnel in direction of available underground water and resources in what may be inappropriate places for landing a rocket.

Groups and individuals could then start creating semi-surface habitats along the tunnel or dig down to lava tubes and other natural cavities. This should give a maximum flexibility for organic growth, whether on Mars or the Moon.

It is also of note that a tunnel, and even more so, a network of tunnels, provides the benefit of space and distance of which our species would otherwize be deprived for the several decades needed to create large pressurized volumes.

It's not that they can't form other places, its the dry surface enviroment, like in the atacama, that makes it possible for them to stay without being eaten by bacteria, or coming in contact with minerals that can reduce them.

I think this paper mentiones it: http://www.eoearth.org/view/article/152738/