WHAT IS THE POSSIBLITY OF HUMANS LIVING ON MARS

- December 26, 2019

The race of Mars exploration has been started 2001 when the discovery of ancient water evidence on Mars sparked a renaissance in Mars exploration. NASA's Mars Odyssey launched March 7, 2001 and arrived at the Red Planet on Oct. 24, 2001. Then later in 2014 a private aerospace company named SpaceX offered a proposal of sending humans on Mars by their SpaceX Starship,

{Proposed image of SpaceX Starship only}

To achieve a large payload, the spacecraft first enters Earth orbit, where it is refueled before it departs to Mars. After landing on Mars, the spacecraft is loaded with locally-produced propellants to return to Earth. The main objective of this mission is to colonize humans on mars.

I suspect in the last half of this century we will build a research output on Mars. It will be very much like the current International Space Station and might house the same size crew of about 3 to 6 astronauts. The output would be built of pressurized cylinders flown and landed from Earth.

These cylinders would be covered over with martian soil to shield the crew from radiation. Food, air and water would be delivered from Earth. Much of the air and water could be recycled and some air and water could even be locally sourced by melting ice.

The “life sustaining environment” would be a small place. Kind of like sharing a small studio apartment with 4 co-workers.

I suspect the crew would spend most other time working inside controlling robot rovers that are on the surface. They would however be able to make a number of EVAs to the surface to do a few things the rovers can’t or to collect samples gathers by the rovers.
In short a living space on Mars in actual better thought of as a space ship that just happens to be on the ground and the internal life support is not much different from if the ship were in space.