Mars Base Design Competition Open To Non-Scientific Professionals

An anonymous reader writes "MakerBot, in collaboration with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), is hosting a competition for the design of a future Mars base. The competition is open to any Thingiverse account holder regardless of professional or educational background. Winners will be chosen by a subjective panel of JPL and MakerBot employees based on scientific feasibility, creativity, and printability. Contest ends June 12, and contestants have to be at least 13 years old. The first place winner will receive a MakerBot Replicator 2 Desktop 3D printer and three spools of MakerBot Filament. The second place winner will receive two spools, and the third place winner will receive one spool. All three will have their design featured on Thingiverse." You can also browse the entries so far.

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[Intrepid imaginaut]

Easiest answer is nuke a polar icecap, gently lower a prefabbed nuclear powered station into the crater, and wait for the meltwater to pour back in. Or start shovelling, whichever is quicker.

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[account_deleted]

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[ShanghaiBill]

More like the fiction was based on science

Humans have lived in close proximity to dirt for a long time. What is so special about Martian dirt that makes it more harmful than terrestrial dirt? Lunar dirt is different, because there is no wind or water erosion, so fine particles have sharp edges that never get rounded off. Mars doesn't have water, but it does have wind and dust storms, so it will be more like terrestrial dirt than lunar dirt.

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[account_deleted]

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[DNS-and-BIND]

Is anyone other than me horrified that a person has just cited a work of fiction as scientific fact? This is a very disturbing trend, I've seen it elsewhere. I get the idea that modern people's brains spend so much time consuming media that they are unable to distinguish between reality and some shit that this guy wrote.

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[account_deleted]

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[account_deleted]

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[DMUTPeregrine]

I read it as suggesting one of many possible difficulties with starting a mars base. Scientists have studied the issue of lunar dust toxicity, but further studies are needed. Mars has a lot of dust, and if it's toxic then extra precautions will need to be taken. A work of fiction has explored this possibility, so it's not a new idea. I don't think he was trying to imply that Red Mars is factual, merely that it is illustrative and partially based on a real potential problem.

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[sillybilly]

Inhaling Mars dust is a big problem! Especially when it has almost no atmosphere! You're breathing by sucking gas out of a friggin can, who cares about the toxicity of the dust? And by the way it should be normal silicate rock, you know, kind of like the stuff you find in riverbeds, volcano ash, or deserts.

Re:

[DMUTPeregrine]

So just as dangerous as any small particulate matter. It will stick to space suits, get in via airlocks, cover equipment that goes outside, etc. You don't want to be breathing fine rock dust. The levels in the pressurized areas will be low, but it's still something to be concerned with. Even if not breathing, it can get into mechanical components of suits and machinery and cause wear. Of course this is assuming a system with a pressurized base and the outside area having natural Martian atmosphere (tenuous

Re:How about...

[Opportunist]

You not only assume that the cave is otherwise airtight, you also assume that it contains no harmful minerals that could pose dangers to humans.

Re:How about...

[Lumpy]

Dont need it airtight, just keep pressure high enough for .8 atmospheres.

Re:

[Opportunist]

Potentially poisonous minerals remain a problem, though. Not to mention that oxygen is precious, it might not be an option to simply keep inflating a leaky balloon.

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[DeBaas]

Perhaps NASA can develop a spray paint kind of solution to fully seal the rock. That would probably weigh a lot less to transport to Mars than a structure strong enough to provide proper shelter against dust storms etc. Caves provide less extreme temperatures which might reduce the energy requirements as well.

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[Lumpy]

They already have that. very thick latex paint can do exactly what you talk about.

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[sillybilly]

The atmosphere is so thin on Mars, the storms are not that bad. The only reason why the dust floats is because gravity is so low. But going to Mars is like a waste of time when you can go to the Moon instead, and get your materials there for constructing a space station. It's a lot closer, and it has a lot less gravity too than Mars, ideal thing to mine for materials.

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[sillybilly]

There is 2.7 % nitrogen and 1.6% argon, both of which work great for breathing gas, you can cryogenically separate the 95% CO2 which doesn't have to be cooled so much, after combusting the toxic carbon monoxide into CO2 also with heated copper oxide gauze. That should eliminate any nitrous oxides too generated by UV/cosmic rays.

For oxygen you can either use the standard but extremely energy hungry silicate rock oxygen extraction, or you can get it out of the CO2 you liquefied. The easiest way is to react

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[sillybilly]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

is a youtube video about sulfur hexafluoride and helium effects comparison on voice.

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[sillybilly]

You don't seal the cave. You enlarge the cave and seal the huge rotating metal cylinder spaceship you put inside that has artificial gravity from spinning, a centrifugal effect, and you walk on the inner walls, your weight matching that on Earth..

On Mars the most energy efficient process of extracting oxygen is from carbon dioxide, and you get carbon as a valuable byproduct too. Or jut pressurize the atmosphere up, then let plants do their weak photosynthesis, and voila, you get oxygen, on Mars.

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[K. S. Kyosuke]

If the martian regolith can be sintered or vitrified, perhaps that would be the best solution? Just apply some heat.

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[mrchaotica]

The primary solar array should be put to the orbit to reduce the maintenance, and beamed back to the surface. Same goes to the primary communication array. This way the amount base on the surface should be minimized, and a replacement units could be sent from Earth.

And you don't have to worry about landing it.

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[tlambert]

Yeah, it is not like the red planet has anything like iron.

OK, so we separate the iron out of the iron oxide, and use the iron as a building material, what are we supposed to do with all the extra oxygen, Mr. Smartypants, *breathe it* and *use it for fuel*?!?!

Oh... Wait...

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[account_deleted]

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[sillybilly]

No no no, we should invest and waste all this time on finding a martian cave to live in like caveman, and then maybe we can go hunt for nonexisting martian dinosaur bones to use as weapons against the nonexisting martian martians.

Going to Mars in the first place is a major waste of time and taxpayer dollars, as the Moon is a lot closer with a lot less gravity to build a rotating cylinder centrifugal artificial gravity space station from. Then only thing Mars has going for it is the 100 x thinner than Eart

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[tlambert]

Taking a trip to outer space right now costs on the order of $10,000 /lb in rocket fuel alone, and for a 200 lb person that comes to like 2 million dollars, so it's really expensive to emigrate into space even if there were livable space stations and farmable areas, pace, you can get a lot of energy that you can convert into rocket fuel, and drop the price of taking a trip to space to something like an airplane ticket cost.

Falcon 9.1 costs are already $1867/lb, so you're off by a factor of over 5X, and the Falcon Heavy is on target for $709/lb, meaning you're off by a factor of 1X4 once that's up and running.

A DC-X would have had less of cost per lb than that, but really, who wants the average person with access to ceramic coated rebar having cheap access to space?

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[sillybilly]

Eventually when there are trillions of humans in existence, Earth will be kind of like a reservation with some jungle people here and there, and there will be a lot of space-age average persons in space, cuz there is a lot of room up there to put them. With ceramic rebars and whatnot. Some of them will be space-terrorists, and instead of mass shootings, they will create intentional holes in the walls and leaks inside space stations and let them go to full vacuum.

I like to see the price of shipping and han

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[sillybilly]

Because gravity ain't big enough on Mars for your skeletal and muscular system not to deteriorate under. On Earth g=9.806 m/s2, on Mars this is 3.711 m/s2, or 37.6% of g on Earth (meaning 100 lb person will weigh 37.6 lbs, a 200 lb person 75.2 lbs, etc) and on the Moon g is 1.622 m/s2, or 16.5% of g on Earth, (meaning a 100 lb person will weigh 16.5 lbs on the Moon, and a 200 lb person 33 lbs, etc.), while in outer space in a "free fall" circular or elliptic orbit around a gravitational object like the Ear

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[tragedy]

Because gravity ain't big enough on Mars for your skeletal and muscular system not to deteriorate under.

We actually don't know that at all. We know that there is deterioration in microgravity/freefall, but we don't know that ~1/3 Earth gravity or even ~1/6th will lead to any deterioration at all. We won't know until we've either had astronauts on an extended trip to Mars or the moon, or until we've tried some other experiment like centrifigul "artificial gravity" in orbit. It may very well be the case that there's no deterioration, or that it can be avoided by wearing weights or just maintaining a higher leve

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[sillybilly]

We can build a 500 meter radius rotating cylinder, a kilometer or two long, out of Moon-mined metals no problem. We have the technology. Ca-thermite reaction with any silicate rock to get CaO, electrolyze CaO somewhat dissolved in water with a mercury cathode to get oxygen and a calcium amalgam, then strip the mercury amalgam with an aprotic ionic solvent that dissolves Ca well and electrolyze back the Ca from it, kinda like copper is refined, and repeat the thermite reaction with fresh materials.Silicate b

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[sillybilly]

By the way with Ca amalgam electrolysis the coulombic efficiency is not 100% because of hydrogen gassing, and the hydrogen overpotential is current density dependent, high current densities lowering the waste, relatively speaking. There are additives that hog active catalytic hydrogen absorption, molecule formation, and surface tension bubble growth (which takes immense pressures at just above Brownian motion scale random bubble sizes), things such active site hogging acetylenic things as used in the steel

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[sillybilly]

Oh, I forgot that sealed lead acid batteries can be sealed because of the special lead-calcium electrodes they used, as opposed to the old standard ones, mostly lead-antimony and other minor things, and I have no clue why that works, but it would be interesting to see if calcium also improves hydrogen overpotential in mercury, but then you might have to go really high on amalgam concentration, into the no longer fluid region.

By the way, if you can figure out an aprotic oxidation and reduction resistant io

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[RockDoctor]

Why not just find a big enough cave or a system of caves which all you would need to do is seal the entrance with a steel door so the cave can be pressurized and oxygen to be flooded in.

You are assuming, quite incorrectly, that the walls, roof and floor of the putative cave will be impermeable. You'd need to at the least seal over the "fracture porosity" (I was discussing an oil well I drilled a few years ago with extensive fracture porosity with an evaluation engineer earlier today, on the off-chance that

Boycott makerBot

[gigne]

Bre Pettis is bad human.

MakerBot went closed source after taking community ideas
http://www.cnet.com/uk/news/pu... [cnet.com]

They patent community ideas
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/... [slashdot.org]

Do NOT use them or their services.

P.S what the best thingiverse replacement?

Re:

[laird]

Really, an AC calling a guy who's been on Slashdot kinda forever of being a shill?! I don't think so...

Re:

[laird]

Read the patent. It's not a patent on auto-leveling, it's a patent on using nozzle deflection to detect when the nozzle collides with something such as hitting a part of the print or for bed leveling. Bed leveling is properly disclosed as prior art. MBI's novel invention is using nozzle deflection (which their new extruder does) to detect collisions.

Really, you have to read patents more carefully. When a patent documents something as prior art, that's the opposite of claiming that it's your invention. Unfor

Re:

[laird]

As evidence that MBI might be right, there are several Chinese companies that took their open Replicator designs and crank out cheap copies, basically relying on MBI's design and software investments and selling at pure hardware cost. They're limited (legally) to using MBI's older designs, while MBI is attempting to innovate, and patent the innovations, to stay ahead of the cheap clones. And (amusingly) at least one of those cloner companies has now made enhancements to MBI's designs, and kept those enhancements proprietary, probably because they want a competitive advantage against smaller cloner^2 companies.

So the argument is that they patented it to protect them selves from the manufacturers who don't care about patents and will just make them and ship them anyway?

A cloner might not care about violating patents, but that's not the only factor, because the patents are enforced on import and within the markets. That is, if a cloner violates US patents, they can't sell product in the US, and the same in the EU, Japan, etc. So MBI, like the vast majority of companies doing engineering, files patents in the major markets (US, EU) so that if someone else blatantly copies their products they have legal leverage to stop them from selling into those markets.

This defense works

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[coofercat]

It's a long way from brilliant, but all my designs are now on Youmagine.com - which I see is starting to get some really interesting stuff posted (far better than any of the tat I've come up with! ;-).

It's run by Ultimaker, so in theory vulnerable to the same problems as Thingiverse, but Ultimaker are quite responsive to their user base, so may do as we've suggested and create a foundation to run it instead. They're also a much smaller company, so don't expect quick turnaround as they're resource constraine

MakerBot advert

[oldhack]

NASA lends its name for a publicity marketing bullshit event for half-assed gizmo outfit, making zero progress toward landing men on Mars.

MakerBot advert

[AchilleTalon]

NASA lends its name for a publicity marketing bullshit event for half-assed gizmo outfit, making zero progress toward landing men on Mars.

True!

Always void on Mars

[Anonymous Coward]

Based on "Contest ... is void ... where taxed" phrase I'm under the impression this contest would be mainly open to Americans only, if even them. (Some weird legalese and syntax in the terms). Additionally, "All Entries must include a description of how and why the submitted MakerBot Mars Design is suitable for the living conditions of a Martian. For the purposes of this Contest, ÃoeMartianà is defined as a native inhabitant of the planet Mars." Given current science is fairly certain there are, i

Construction problem more than design

[tomhath]

The problem with building a human habitat in such a remote location is lack of heavy machinery and lack of energy source. It has to be almost self erecting and require very little (or at least very lightweight) material and only the power a human wearing a bulky suit can provide. Ideally it would be near a source of water and situated where the Sun and wind are favorable. Of course even if you could build it and get people moved in they wouldn't have anything to do that a robot couldn't do better.

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[tragedy]

Mars gets much less little solar energy than Earth, and the atmosphere is murky/dusty. See Nuke power plant above.

Mars has lower insolation than Earth due to distance from the sun, but it's not as bad as you think. Not least because you're exactly wrong about the murkiness/dustiness of the atmosphere. The Martian atmosphere is spectacularly clear. Even during the worst dust storms (which aren't really all that common) the amount of light reaching the ground is barely affected. So, although the average insolation on Earth is 250W/m^2 and the average on Mars is 150W/m^2, more of that power is actually usable on Mars. Bas

Why not underground?

[ArcadeMan]

Since Mars has no atmosphere, wouldn't living on Mars require shielding against micrometeorites? What about radiation?

Why build something above the ground? Make an underground city and you gain "free" extra-thick shielding and you also get real radiation shielding at the same time.

Re:Why not underground?

[frank249]

Underground habitats are required not only due to the radiation threat but also due to the cold temperatures. The average temperature is -55C. Surface temperatures may reach a high of about 20 C (293 K; 68 F) at noon, at the equator, and a low of about 153 C (120 K; 243 F) at the poles. Actual temperature measurements at the Viking landers' site range from 17.2 C (256.0 K; 1.0 F) to 107 C (166 K; 161 F). The warmest soil temperature on the Mars surface estimated by the Viking Orbiter was 27 C (300 K; 81 F).

Images from the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) aboard NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter have revealed seven possible cave entrances on the flanks of the volcano Arsia Mons. The caves, named after loved ones of their discoverers, are collectively known as the "seven sisters." Cave entrances measure from 100 m to 252 m wide and they are believed to be at least 73 m to 96 m deep. Because light does not reach the floor of most of the caves, it is possible that they extend much deeper than these lower estimates and widen below the surface. "Dena" is the only exception; its floor is visible and was measured to be 130 m deep. The interiors of these caverns may be protected from micrometeoroids, UV radiation, solar flares and high energy particles that bombard the planet's surface.

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[Intrepid imaginaut]

Ten thousand years of painful scientific advancement and we go back to living in caves.

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[sillybilly]

It's a good place to hide the elite people. Also meteorites in the meteorite belt past Mars can be used as disguised space stations, if you dig a hole in the middle of them. Great camouflage.

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[sillybilly]

The real reason for underground caverns on Mars is to secretly hide elite people who will proliferate all over the Universe, and keep all the dumb ones down here, well, dumb. Then even in case of a nuclear catastrophy or global disease outbreak, all the dumb ones down here will disappear, together with a few smart ones as collateral damage, but the smart ones can come back and recolonize Earth again. The Moon is gravitationally locked to us, always showing the same face, else it would have tides in its crus

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[tragedy]

Underground habitats are required not only due to the radiation threat but also due to the cold temperatures.

Temperature on Mars does not translate to temperature on Earth. The very thin atmosphere means that there's much less actual heat involved than the same temperature on Earth and also that a low temperature on Mars doesn't draw heat away as fast as a low temperature on Earth. Building underground is probably neccessary due to radiation concerns, but heat might actually be more of a problem below groun

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[sillybilly]

Living on Earth also requires shielding against micrometeorites that didn't completely finish burning up as shooting stars. There are lots of mineralogists collecting meteorites, each of which successfully made it to the planet's surface. Meteorites were also a source of iron for ancients in Bible times before iron smelting was invented. So it's only a matter of time before you get hit on the head by a meteorite down here on Earth too, but chances are so small that most people make it safely to death. Same

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[tragedy]

Since Mars has no atmosphere, wouldn't living on Mars require shielding against micrometeorites? What about radiation?

Mars has an atmosphere. It's very thin, so radiation and meteorites are a concern. Micrometeorites are not, however. They burn up or lose momentum in the atmosphere, thin as it is.

Coffins

[AchilleTalon]

Coffins would make the perfect Mars base since first settlers are likely to arrive dead.

Re:

[sillybilly]

Hey it beats putting a wind turbine into the vacuum of outer space with 0.000..001% Earth atmospheric pressure.

Hire ...

[PPH]

.. the urban planner that did District 9 [ejumpcut.org]

3D printing a Mars base?

[Blaskowicz]

paid for in bitcoins and developed with a Raspberri Pi cluster.

Fuck, if you wanted to discredit 3D printers then fantasies about Mars bases would be perfect. Sorry, I don't get how technological anarchism shit and a $100 billion+ suicide mission to a cold underpressurized piece of rock relate together.
I can't wait for ISS to be deorbited in 2020 and then most manned space missions to be canceled. I don't give a fuck. Even pissing-contest yachts should be outllawed and seized by the owners's States without c

A moon base would make more sense -- or Venus

[ShoulderOfOrion]

Much closer, more scientifically useful.

If you want sustainably habitable, Venus is a better choice. Similar in size to the Earth, and much closer than Mars. Use 'global warming' mitigation techniques developed on Earth to convert Venus CO2 to oxygen, and then add hydrogen to create water. The biggest problem is figuring out how to speed up the rotation of Venus. That's a tough one.

Caves

[amoeba1911]

Humans have taken shelter in caves on earth before they had the means of building advanced structures. We might revert to caves on Mars too until we have sufficient technology there to build our own structures.