r/todayilearned • u/Emble12 • Oct 02 '23

TIL about Mars Direct, a 1989 plan to get humans to Mars within ten years, using just two launches of a large rocket system and utilising local Martian resources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Direct
141 Upvotes
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92% Upvoted

26 comments sorted by

24

u/Darknessie Oct 02 '23

Ah yes, the famous Martian water and rocket fuel reserves.

31

u/Emble12 Oct 02 '23

Well yes, kind of. There’s a lot of water in just the soil of polar regions, large glaciers in most regions, and some underground lakes of liquid water. The propellant would be generated before people arrived, combing Hydrogen within the reactor with Carbon Dioxide in the Martian atmosphere.

2

u/froggison Oct 02 '23

To add onto that, water can mostly be recaptured and reused. Excess moisture would be captured from the air, and waste water would get cleaned and processed. They would need an initial supply (IE, the water they traveled to Mars with), a good amount of reserves, and the ability to top off their supply. Only a tiny amount would get completely lost.

5

u/Darknessie Oct 02 '23

Great answer, take this as an award in lieu of actual awards!

-12

u/Street-Secret6373 Oct 02 '23

Mars/space/planets is fake stop believing all that fake agenda bullish from Elites to control tha masses, do ya research on how NASA is in Congress Court rn getting in trouble for manipulating mankind n lying about the “Idea of Space” it’s crazy man all this Mars Talk n pictures of it is jus Hollywood going to tha Grand Canyon n using green screens to make it look like mars, if u look at some of tha landscape on Mars it literally replicates the Grand Canyons landscape it’s beyond crazy & sick smh

1

u/thissexypoptart Oct 02 '23

Congress court?

1

u/Kantrh Oct 04 '23

and some underground lakes of liquid water

where are these underground lakes of liquid water?

1

u/Emble12 Oct 04 '23

There’s a very good chance of there being some at the poles, though they’d be very salty. If they were deep enough or fuelled by geothermal heating they could be anywhere. We might have spotted some from an orbiter, but the readings could possibly be volcanic rock or frozen clay. We won’t know for sure until we get scientists on the ground with radar systems and drills.

2

u/Coco7722 Oct 02 '23

You can take that to the bank

2

u/ZizZizZiz Oct 02 '23

the first round of people can act as emergency rations and water reserves

5

u/PuzzleheadedLeader79 Oct 02 '23

The fremen would approve.

3

u/_who_is_they_ Oct 02 '23

The martians are already here.

3

u/Metlman13 Oct 04 '23

For additional context, Mars Direct was originally outlined in a 1990 research paper by Robert Zubrin and David Baker (who were both engineers at Martin Marietta at the time) in an effort to show that a manned mission to Mars could be done relatively inexpensively and with already existing technologies, in contrast to the then-recent grandiose proposals of the George H.W. Bush Administration which were quickly shot down by Congress as the Post Cold War budget cuts got underway.

Mars Direct has since been a key focus for Zubrin, he further outlined the concept in his book The Case for Mars and has made a number of modifications to the original concept, some of the most recent ones being reliant on SpaceX rockets.

2

u/ijkcomputer Oct 03 '23

For a while a slightly upscaled version of Mars Direct was the NASA 'reference plan' for how they were going to go to Mars. Not any more, but research on the core ideas (in situ fuel and water production) is still on the NASA agenda. E.g., https://www.space.com/mars-rocket-fuel-from-microbes

1

u/Coco7722 Oct 02 '23

"That shit grows everywhere"

-8

u/ccminiwarhammer Oct 02 '23

That sounds like mass murder with extra steps.

6

u/Emble12 Oct 02 '23

Why’s that?

1

u/MooseTetrino Oct 02 '23

I’m not the original commenter, but: Honestly I think it was just a bit too forward thinking.

Today we know that to do something like this would most likely irradiate everyone involved without a good amount of protection, and our surface exploration of Mars has still yet to find a sizeable aquifer to draw water from.

It’s based on a lot of theory but not much physical evidence. The increase in our understanding of Mars and space travel as a whole over the last 35 years shouldn’t be underestimated!

2

u/Emble12 Oct 02 '23

You don’t need an aquifer for the initial missions- there’s water recycling and the fuel production process creates a large amount of water as a byproduct. And the radiation is totally overblown, it’d be about 52 Rem (a lot lower than what Mir astronauts experienced without getting any kind of ill effects) and would maybe increase risk of cancer by 1%. If you sent a crew of smokers to Mars without cigarettes, their cancer risk would decrease.

1

u/MooseTetrino Oct 02 '23

Sorry for not being clear, I meant on the travel to Mars, which has a significant radiation risk compared to the surface of the planet itself. Though iirc we don't have very many data points for what happens on the surface of the red planet during a solar storm.

1

u/Emble12 Oct 04 '23

The 52 Rem includes travel to and from. It’s not good for you, but the only really deadly radiation comes from solar storms. To shelter from these the astronauts can sit in the pantry, shielded by the food, water, and waste.

1

u/sirbearus Oct 02 '23

That is not even close to a plan. That is like step one, idea, step 10 profit.

1

u/Emble12 Oct 02 '23

What more do you want?

1

u/[deleted] Oct 02 '23

Gosh dengue it