Settling the Solar System
"Space - the Final Frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: To explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no man has gone before."
--Star Trek
Space, most definitely the final frontier, is the last place for humans to demonstrate their dominance over all they see. With this grand vision our class began: only a mandate to take mankind to the stars as guidance and a month's worth of time to do it in. With minimal previous knowledge, we had to grasp the basics of rocketry and the solar system so we could realistically plan missions from planet to planet. We learned about the rocket equations and how the makeup of Mars precludes itself to colonization, along with other aspects of current space travel technology. Afterwards we divided up into four groups to plan our first mission: Mars.
The American Mission to Mars
Our Martian Starship
Our first task was to establish a presence on our closest viable planetary neighbor, Mars. We were given two weeks to devise and plan our mission with each of the four groups working on a separate task.
Propulsion: How do we get there?
Life Support: How do we keep our crew alive and sane on a two-year journey?
Surface Habitat: Where do we live and what do we do when we get to Mars?
Terraforming: How do we make Mars like the blue green sphere we all know and love? After many days and many more interesting discussions (the "Giant Space Mirror" comes immediately to mind), we had a working plan for our mission. After presenting our ideas, we moved swiftly on to our greatest hurdle, the mission to Titan.
The Titan Mission
The Long-Range Titan Explorer to Scale Alongside the Martian Transport
The second half of the class was spent planning our grand expedition to Titan, moon of Saturn. We were given controlled fusion reactors and nanotechnology as non-standard capabilities to help accomplish our mission, which was supposedly staged sixty years in the future. The fusion reactors actually were the reason for going to Titan. Titans' host, Saturn, has a very high concentration of a rare helium isotope (3He) which is required for the fusion reactors. New and more interesting problems were posed due to the extended nature of this trip.
Propulsion: How big a ship would we need to form a semi-permanent colony right off the bat, and how would we get such a monstrosity moving?
Life Support: If the two years to Mars were bad, how could we keep people alive in what looks like a permanent exile in zero-G? What precautions would we have to take to keep any offspring healthy enough to survive this far away from Terra?
Surface Habitat: Other than helium mining, what would our people do to keep themselves busy while on Titan? What kinds of experiments would they run in this very, very alien environment?
Helium Mining Operations: How would you get all of this helium from Saturn's atmosphere? It's not just going to jump out and fly to Titan for you; you somehow have to collect it and transport it out of Saturn's gravity well. Also, how do you propose to get the helium back to Earth, or wherever it's needed? Again, it's not going to move itself, so you'll have to devise some method to move it.
With these tasks and some of Dr. Sumerlin's excellant lectures on the "Other Weird Stuff" in space, we finished out the month in style.
- From our Summer 2008 students
