MMM Classics Year 10: MMM #s 91-100 - Moon Society

drilling holes for heat conducting rods or superheated steam
pipes. Such waste heat would be available if the outpost had a
small nuclear plant both for heat, power and for extraction of
various atmospheric gasses.
(3) We can cover the frozen ground with an “infraredblack”
plastic tarp and apply concentrated solar heating.
Which ever method we use to extract the ice-melt, it
may be necessary, if the water proves to be saline, to distill the
melt to purify it of salts (and possibly heavy metals). A few
“ground truth” cores taken by rover drilling probes would soon
establish just how fresh or how brackish the permafrost ice is,
and whether it varies in quality from place to place.
Excess water produced by an outpost’s local permafrost
tap may then be trucked, or airlifted, or eventually pipelined
to other less advantaged settlements and outposts. Thus,
water could well be the first real intra-Mars trade commodity.
(A futures market, anyone?)
What alternative sources of water are there?
Other most options for providing water needed for
drinking and hygiene, agriculture and life support, processing
and manufacturing do exist:
(1) Nuclear powered atmospheric hydro-extraction
plants are certainly feasible. In 10,000 tons of Mars air, there
are 3 tons of water vapor, i.e. 0.03%, plus 7 tons of oxygen and
270 tons of nitrogen, both of which would also be extracted as
byproducts. Each outpost or settlement is likely to have such a
plant anyway, to produce carbon monoxide and methane fuels
as well as fresh oxygen and nitrogen. The question is, will such
a plant produce enough water in the process to meet demands,
or will this “air-water” need to be supplemented?
(2) A much bolder and higher cost option would be to
mine ice from the edge of the north polar cap (the southern cap
may be mostly carbon dioxide frost). Melted, this glacial melt
could then be trucked (requiring roads or ground effect
vehicles) or (especially later as population on Mars and
demand grows) a network of aqueducts would follow the paths
imagined by Schiaparelli and Lowell from the north polar cap
southwards. (cf. MMM #62 FEB ‘93, pp. 6-7 “CANALS on
Mars” [republished in MMM Classics #7] and MMM #73
MAR ‘94, p. 5 “Canal Names” - Read in MMM Classics #8)
One or both of these options can serve “ice-dry” areas of Mars.
Putting together a Mars Permafrost Map - Now
Because extensive permafrost zones are found here on
Earth (some continuous, some discontinuous, some patchy), we
have an ideal opportunity to fly the needed radar instrument
package in polar Earth orbit to both test how well it can detect
permafrost and to properly calibrate the instruments by
checking their readings with actual data on the ground, so we
will have greater confidence in interpreting the readings we get
in flying an identical instrument package around Mars. We
need to determine how well depth of the layer below the
surface, ice content percentage, and thickness of the deposits
are indicated in the readings, and whether differences in
salinity or other factors affect the data points we get.
If flown alone (not with lavatube radar) as co-op U.S.-
Russian mission, Bering (Russian-born explorer of Alaska,
Vitus Bering) might be a good name for the probe. Mars
Permafrost Mapper would be an alternate choice.
A Space Frontier Tech Demo Program
IDEAS for Lo-budget, 2 yr.-feasible
demonstrations of technology items
that will be needed or useful
on the Martian Frontier.
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[* The following suggestions by no means exhaust the possibilities
and readers are encouraged to think of, pre- brainstorm,
and report to MMM of other neat doable projects that will help
bring home to all of us, veteran space enthusiasts and general
public alike, the concrete doability of space pioneering on the
Moon, Mars and elsewhere in the Inner Solar System. ]
The “Mars Engine”
The goal is to produce a motor vehicle engine for use
on Mars that will burn fuel and oxidizer derived from Mars’
atmosphere and whose combustion products will return to the
atmospheric gasses from which they were derived. Two fuel
combinations are possible: “Carmonox” engines will burn
carbon monoxide (2 CO +O2); “Methanox” or “Oochie”
engines will burn methane (O2 + CH4). Methane is the more
powerful fuel and will be the fuel of choice if reasonably saltfree
water can easily be produced from permafrost taps.
The GOAL of this tech demo is not a vehicle chassis
suitable for Martian terrain, but an engine that can be used in
any such vehicle: car, truck, coach, caterpillar, etc.
START: There are now any number of experimental
methane burning vehicles already on the road. REPLACE the
carburetor with bottled oxygen and combine with the methane
in an INTERNAL COMBUSTION cycle, not a rocket motor.
AND DEBUG. DEMO at ISDC ‘98 Milwaukee.
A Mars Airplane
The density of Martian air at average surface levels is
equivalent to the atmospheric pressure on Earth at 125,000 ft.,
an altitude that can be reached by a baloon-mounted platform.
DESIGN, BUILD, and FLY an unpiloted airplane to and from
such a platform - at or during ISDC ‘98 Milwaukee.
Paul Swift of the Ontario Space Society (ISDC ‘94
Toronto) has expressed an interest in taking up this challenge.
Mars Meteorburst Experiment
Meteorburst communications which bounce messages
off the electronic debris trails of incoming meteors high in the
atmosphere have been used successfully for over-the-horizon
communications by long distance trucking companies. The
devices never having to wait more than a second or two before
finding a suitable placed meteorburst.
Because these events occur high up, this system also
should work well on Mars, as a reliable backup to a more
expensive to deploy and maintain satellite communications
system. DESIGN, BUILD, and FLY such a system, again
aboard a balloon-hung platform at an altitude of 125,000 feet.
Moon Miners’ Manifesto Classics - Year 10 - Republished January 2006 - Page 31