Company to Settle and Mine Mars 526
Rutgersen writes "Wired is reporting that a new startup is planning to colonize and mine Mars by 2025. From the article: 'The new company, 4Frontiers, plans to mine Mars for building materials and energy sources, and export the planet's mineral wealth to forthcoming space stations on the moon and elsewhere.'"
Anyone else notice? (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe, it's nothing.
Re:Late Breaking News: (Score:1, Informative)
Optimistic numbers (Score:3, Informative)
It's a lot easier on Mars than on Earth (Score:4, Informative)
But on Mars it's a lot easier than on Earth. First, safety is not as much of a concern. If you have a big radioactive spill on Earth, you've caused a lot of problems. On Mars, well, no one is drinking the groundwater anyway and the whole place is already uninhabited. So that greatly simplifies your factory.
Second, you don't need to run on 100% uranium fuel. Here on Earth, no one wants to generate plutonium for reactors because of proliferation fears (founded or not). On Mars, proliferation is not a concern. Anyone who has the technology to get to Mars should be able to build atomic weapons fairly easily, and atomic explosives will probably be needed for engineering work, so spending time worrying about proliferation on Mars is silly.
The good thing about being free to burn plutonium is that it's easy to make plutonium from the left-over depleted uranium. All you need is a big neutron flux, pump that through the depleted uranium, and you get plutonium fuel.
What this means is that on Earth, you need to mine 140 tons of uranium metal to get one ton of U235, which is the only kind that works as fuel. On Mars, you mine 140 tons of uranium metal, extract the 1 ton of U235, and use that to convert the remaining 139 tons of U238 to plutonium. We can't do that on Earth for political / military reasons, but we can do it on Mars.
So yeah, many of the same problems remain, but the whole process of going from uranium ore to energy would be a lot simpler on Mars.
Once you have a basic reactor going (enough to generate fuel) you can start lifting your raw uranium ore into Mars orbit. It's a lot easier to get off the surface of Mars than it is to get off of Earth. Then you refine it in orbit, where you can be as unsafe and messy as you want, you blast all the waste products into the sun, and you send back down your refined U235 or plutonium fuel rods.
Re:Yeah, and I will cure cancer in 2045 (Score:3, Informative)
So less heating capacity than my daughter's blowdryer.
That is not nearly enough energy to power an industrial park. As I said, the venture will probably have to rely on nuclear power. Not that I wouldn't use nuclear energy if I were to operate on Mars, but where is that economic inflection point at which you can turn a profit? How much would a business have to import to make a manufacturing prospect work out?
And once you have produced your goods, how much to ship them to market? UPS charges more than the USPS, but if I am shipping large volumes of manufactured goods, I would want to use a large craft. How much to build a fleet of space-trucks? Some of that data exists, but we know that there are tremendous losses that have to be factored in.
And what about insurance underwriting? How much is insurance going to cost, for one trip to the Red Planet, provided anyone would underwrite the policy?
If you are willing to pay $1MUSD for the first television set manufactured on Mars just for bragging rights, I'm rooting for you. I will pick the same "Hencho en Mexico" version for $50USD brand at the local discount store.
They have panels roughly the size of a golf cart....
To power even a light manufacturing plant, I'd say you are probably looking at a football field's worth of panels. I'm sure an EE can give you more precise numbers, but I think we can agree that it would not be a couple of golf cart's worth.
Re:Yeah, and I will cure cancer in 2045 (Score:3, Informative)
If the shuttle was still allowed to take a load back from orbit (or it was even allowed to fly at all), it could carry 40,000 pounds back to earth. There's 14.58 troy ounces in a pound, and gold runs int he $450 an ounce range these days. 40,000 * 14.58 * 450 = ~262 million.
If gold ingots were available, 99.9 pure, in orbit, free for the taking, it would still not be anywhere near worth going up to fetch them with the shuttle. At a half billion of direct operating cost (before you factor in it needs to be replace after 50 flights), the gold returned still barely equates to half the mission cost.
Sometimes the phrase 'worth it's weight in gold' means 'just not worth it'.