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Category Archives: Mars Colonization

Private Mars Colony Project May Not Be Feasible, Study Suggests

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Organizers of a private Mars colonization effort may have to rethink their ambitious plans, a new study reports.

An analysis led by students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has identified a few purported problems with the blueprint laid out by the Netherlands-based nonprofit Mars One, which aims to land four people on the Red Planet in 2025 as the vanguard of a permanent settlement.

"We're not saying, black and white, Mars One is infeasible," study co-author Olivier de Weck, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics and engineering systems at MIT, said in a statement. "But we do think it's not really feasible under the assumptions they've made. We're pointing to technologies that could be helpful to invest in with high priority, to move them along the feasibility path." [Mars One's Red Planet Colony Project (Gallery)]

The Dutch nonprofit Mars One aims to land four colonists on the Red Planet in 2023. Do you want to be one of them?

The study team looked at many different aspects of the proposed Mars One mission, from the rockets needed to get gear to the Red Planet to the details of how settlers would grow their food. The results are sobering for would-be colonists, more than 200,000 of whom have applied to be a one-way Mars One astronaut. (There are no plans at the moment to bring the settlers back to Earth.)

For example, Mars One aims to source the colony's drinking water on-site by baking Red Planet soil, which is known to harbor water ice, at least in some locations. But the technology needed to do this is not yet ready to fly on a space mission, study authors said.

Furthermore, the new analysis suggests that growing crops within settlers' habitats, as Mars One envisions, would generate enough oxygen to make the living spaces a fire hazard.

Piping in nitrogen could lower the oxygen to safe levels, researchers said, but this fix would likely deprive the colony of a vital gas needed to compensate for leakage into the surrounding Martian atmosphere. The possible end result? A space that would quickly become unlivable, suffocating colonists after about 10 weeks, the study found.

There are ways to prevent this scenario growing food in isolated greenhouses, for example, or implementing an oxygen-extraction system. But the best alternative is to nix the idea of Mars farms and bring all the colony's food from Earth, the study determined.

"We found [that] carrying food is always cheaper than growing it locally," said study lead author Sydney Do, an MIT grad student. "On Mars, you need lighting and watering systems, and for lighting, we found it requires 875 LED [light-emitting diode] systems, which fail over time. So you need to provide spare parts for that, making the initial system heavier."

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Private Mars Colony Project May Not Be Feasible, Study Suggests

Humans may only survive for 68 days on Red Planet

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WASHINGTON: Space enthusiasts planning a move to Mars may have to wait to relocate: conditions on the Red Planet are such that humans would likely begin dying within 68 days, a new study says. Oxygen levels would start to deplete after about two months and scientists said new technologies are required before humans can permanently settle on Mars, according to the study by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The five-person team used data from Mars One, a Dutch-based non-profit group behind an audacious project to permanently colonize the Red Planet starting in 2024. A shortlist of more than 1,000 people from an initial pool of 200,000 applicants will be whittled down to 24 for the mission an irreversible move to Mars, which is to be partially funded by a reality television show about the endeavor. But conditions on Mars and the limits of human technology could make the mission impossible, for now at least. The first crew fatality would occur approximately 68 days into the mission, according to the 35-page report, which analyzed mathematical formulas on oxygen, food and technology required for the project. Plants required to feed the space colony would produce unsafe amounts of oxygen, the authors said. Some form of oxygen removal system is required, a technology that has not yet been developed for space flight, the study concluded. Shipping in replacement parts is an additional challenge and will likely boost the cost of the mission, which the researchers estimated to be at least $4.5 billion. Mars One co-founder and CEO Bas Lansdorp agreed that sending spare parts to Mars could pose a problem. The major challenge of Mars One is keeping everything up and running, he told Popular Science magazine. But he claimed the researchers used incomplete data, adding that technology for Mars colonization was nearly ready. While oxygen removal has never been done in space, I disagree that the technology is not mostly ready to go to Mars, Lansdorp told AFP. Of course, the actual apparatus that we will take to Mars still needs to be designed and tested extensively, but the technology is already there. Many people have voiced doubts about the mission, though the project has won support from Gerard t Hooft, the Dutch 1999 Nobel Physics prize winner. The Red Planet lies at least 55 million kms from Earth and it would take a minimum of seven months to get there. Last June, the entertainment company Endemol, a major reality television producer, agreed to film the participants as they prepared for the move to Mars.

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Humans may only survive for 68 days on Red Planet


  1. Mars Colonization