Some other stuff martians will need:

- Replacement rubber caskets for airlocks and the kilometres of plumbing. Synthetic rubber seems petrol based; natural rubber trees seem to need a lot of space.

- A source of fabric for clothes and other cloth stuff. Presumably natural fibres like hemp or cotton or plastic fibres. Sheep, I think, will be right out. Mars is vegan.

- An enormous amount of greenhouses (a lot of glass) or grow houses (energy, insulation) for growing the vegan diet. I assume a Martian colony will look something like this: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/150070/almerias-sea...

>Today I think it is a profitable research area to look into manufacturing techniques that might let a colony of 15,000 martians be largely self-sufficient in that this research could pay off here on Earth.

I don't know how they will be able to manufacture CPUs on Mars, I'm guessing 8-bit CPUs will be more possible than modern day CPUs. I think even Motorola 68K will still require advanced manufacturing equipment to transport to manufacture.

I guess with close to 50 years of CPU design knowledge they would be able to design a decent 8-bit CPU with 16-bit address space. Maybe they would use first 512 bytes as a data/code cache to speed up certain calculations (trig functions) (Not a EE, studying Mechanical). Although there is a lot of code available for Z80, 6502, 8080 CPUs.

It's not conflating, it's comparing, and draws the conclusion that "energy beaming" won't work on Mars. It also correctly discusses the challenges "nukes in space" has from a policy and practical standpoint.

> While the Earth-facing side of the Moon can obtain practically infinite quantities of very cheap power if we beam it up from Earth, which is greatly preferable to attempting to engineer some sort of solar or thermal system which can cope with the Moon’s 28-day day-night cycle, this approach won’t work on Mars.

Handmer sometimes speaks outside his core competencies, but I find his napkin math to be extremely insightful.

You may enjoy his recent interview on Patio11's podcast:

[1] https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/solar-economi...

He is one of the few (only?) person who when talks publicly about this or that space projects or ideas, tries to include ALL potential costs into big picture, even if they are very rough estimates.

Usually when corporations or officials speak about space, they cherry pick some single issue, or maybe a few but not all of them. E.g. talk about weight but forget about cost, talk about weight and cost but forget about cooling. Or when companies talk about any complex gadgets in space and forget to account for them being space based, thus more complex and expensive. These incomplete PR statements are useless for regular people outside of the industry because we lack a lot of knowledge to fill the gaps.

But reading his posts we can very quickly and reliably get basic understanding why some ideas are dead ends for nearest century despite being hyped, and why others are potentially interesting. Also he references a lot of sources in his posts, which would be hard to find but here they are linked in the relevant articles.

And finally his roasting of the Space Disgrace System is worth it on it's own really :)

This man has 2 small self published books on the topic of mars colonisation. He is obviously a serious expert to listen

On Mars the r^2 scaling just means that solar panels produce ~half as much energy as on Earth. For dust there are electrostatic sweeping grids that automatically remove it.

Realize that nuclear also gets more expensive on Mars, because there are no convenient lakes or rivers for cooling water. Instead you need to build a large radiator or underground pipe grid.

I only skimmed it but he clearly says that "energy beaming" won't work with Mars.

I also don't think there was any "conflation."

It's all about the weight. Solar panels are light, nuclear reactors are not. Handmer correctly focuses on the metric of tonnes per megawatt.

It's a good article, well research but feels amateurish in some parts.

For example, he seems to be confused about energy vs. power, which units to use and what to they mean.

As an aside, post-2000 research like your link really makes me wanna dive into notoriously-crunchy sci-fi RPG & wargame systems and validate/update their construction rules to account for advances in the science. Mostly thinking GURPS: Vehicles and Traveller's Fire, Fusion, and Steel....

https://boardgamegeek.com/rpgitem/49409/fire-fusion-and-stee...

> This is what mass-optimized, gigawatt-scale space nuclear reactors look like.

A nuclear rocket and a nuclear power plant are vastly different things, for the same reason a jet engine and an oil power plant look quite different.

The reactor itself is a spatially small part of everything - the little doughnut in the middle. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:EPR_1_EPR_2_perso.pn...

Westinghouse recently announced a mini-nuclear reactor capable of powering several hundred homes (https://info.westinghousenuclear.com/news/first-canadian-evi...). The reactor itself is the size of small apartment and would fit aboard a spaceship (the now defunct Space Shuttle) and is light enough that a large rocket (like the Saturn) could carry it into space. The reactor plant would be constructed around the reactor at its final destination (in this particular case, Saskatchewan Canada, but for purposes of this discussion, Mars).

As a side benefit of the design, it uses the heat of the reactor to provide heating, which a Mars colony would need a lot of.

> I would love someone with more knowledge to fully explore what a similar sized space station could achieve compared to the arduous task of going down martian gravity well that has half the solar energy and on top of that a night cycle which halves your solar output again.

Issues:

First, the solar energy at the surface is much the same as it is in orbit, because of Mars' very thin atmosphere -- unless a dust storm kicks in. This means there's no justification to use orbital solar with the attendant high capital costs and conversion losses.

Second, being able to live below the surface in any of the existing lava tubes as protection against high surface radiation levels and wide temperature extremes, thus eliminating all the complexities of an orbital presence, makes the orbital option a non-starter.

Third, an orbital presence would require generating artificial gravity to prevent known and serious health issues, less true for a surface colony (Mars' surface gravity is 38% that of Earth).

Fourth, a carefully chosen lava tube site would have much better control over environmental temperatures than a surface or orbital colony. Remember that Mars surface temperatures regularly drop to -100F overnight. Temperature extremes would also be an issue in a lava tube, but with less severity if the site were carefully chosen.

I think a Mars colonization project at scale will choose a surface colony over an orbital presence on multiple grounds.

> I just dont see any scenario where a mars base would outperform a space station above mars/earth/moon/lagrange point with the ability to recover asteroids of a few metric tons.

If the mission is to collect or mine asteroids, that would change everything. All the above assumes some other purpose -- for example, Mars surface mining.

The advantage of being on Mars is that as your population expands you mostly need to just dig more tunnels for them to live in. With a space station you have to build more space stations or somehow add on to your existing one, which is very difficult with artificial gravity setups. The explosive failure modes of a space station are less of a concern on an underground Mars colony as well.

But this of course raises the question as to why you would do either instead of staying on Earth. Elon Musk talks a lot about a multi-planetary species, but it's extremely unclear how long it would take for a Mars colony to become self sufficient. And anything you can do underground on Mars you can do underground on Earth but with fewer catastrophic failure cases. The only threats a Mars colony protects against are a dinosaur killing asteroid strike and a completely runaway greenhouse effect turning Earth into a second Venus. Even worse, if Elon were serious about the Mars colony he should have multiple fully self-sufficient test colonies on Earth vetting out the technologies now, but if he had that it negates the need for the Mars colonies.

In addition the surface of Mars has lots of radiation which would require you to live under some sort of shielding or in a cave.

>The average radiation level on Mars is 24–30 rads (240–300 mSv) per year, which is 40–50 times higher than Earth's.

Everything on Mars is designed to kill you. I don’t understand the appeal either except for ultra rich on earth that are looking for a new exclusive neighborhood to move into, away from the serfs funding it.

It's probably the martian dust and not the thickness of the atmosphere that creates the need for protection.

absolutely need dust protection on Mars, more than on earth

wind speeds are generally lower, but the dust is thermostatically charged, tends to stick to everything, and is incredibly abrasive — wires would also need to be insulated from Mars dust because it's conductive

it's a very hostile environment for solar, dramatic temperature changes are also a factor

There are folding camping solar panels that are designed to balance portability with reasonable durability.

The author of this blog is also very into terraforming Earth! https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2024/10/26/we-can-terrafo...

It's nothing to do with economics. Was landing people on the moon economics?

Why climb a mountain?

I'm not sure there's much of an economic case for terraforming Mars so much as it seeming kind of cool to be multiplanetary. I'm not sure what the startups are selling.

That said I think I'd prefer they kept it more as national park / site of special scientific interest rather than a construction site.

You’re ignoring the mass-transmission losses of moving heavy panels to the Moon. Concluding the author’s back-of-the-envelope math is a “non-starter” with zero numbers, just hand waiving, is heavy with hubris.