On Mars - with gravity, albeit weak, the Martian colonists can start to enjoy some semblance of normal life. In this, the crew can enjoy running water, hot showers and the ability to cook real meals in a kitchen of sorts. This must come alongside the progression of colony build-out to support to their mental and physical health. It will be a keystone, cementing Mars as human's second home in the solar system.
Imagine the scene - our habitat leader turns a tap, filling her water glass, washing her hands before taking a meal. Seeing first water from the local water generation plant will be a great comfort to the crew. It will be one of the first real examples that the colonisation effort is succeeding.
Water for Exercise and Relaxation
It may seem like a jump and quite frivolous but after a few cycles, it is a good idea to build a pool. Once the essential habitat, science facilities, propellant, water and air plants have been deployed, it would make sense to build home comforts that our crew have been without. After all, having some modicum of gravity does open up some opportunities across all areas, and Mars means New Home for Humankind.
This will enable the crew to have some opportunity to swim, developing strong, resilient bodies, without using the traditional exercise methods that are used on Earth and the ISS.
Being able to swim in liquid water on Mars will be a unique novelty, but a health and mental wellbeing priority. Water has a soothing effect on humans. This is well documented in the use of hydrotherapy pools for injury recovery, and sensory experience for people living with disabilities.
Additionally, a heated pool gives the opportunity to intensify the energy use on the station - using the pool as a heat sink for any process heat waste - coming from the above-mentioned process plants.
Water for Showers and Cleaning
A key takeaway from many astronauts visit to the ISS is that it does tend to smell of body odour. Consider that the station has been home to a great many capable scientists and engineers since its inception 20 years ago. The station has added modules but there has not really seen any deep cleaning occurring.
Furthermore, a recent article by Richard Hollingham advised that indeed this is the case. With ISS occupants needing to complete a weekly wipe down with antibacterial wipes and a vacuum cleaner to pick up loose debris and crumbs. This only really touches the surface - quite literally. The other aspect is that despite leaving Earth as a set of sterile units, the habitat and modules which are delivered to Mars ahead of the Earth crewed mission will quickly become contaminated. The microbes which our bodies are host to will naturally shed, contact and come to live on the surfaces around our crew.
Yes - its what it sounds like - even a planet away, on Mars, there are cleaning chores.
The good news is that, as demonstrated by the human crewed ISS, it is possible to keep on top of the levels of biological contamination successfully and still carry out work in the long-term artificial environment.
The two things that came out of Richard's article for me were:
1) Microbes in space have tended to adapt to binding onto metallic surfaces, indeed enabling them to digest the metal. Yes metallophillic bacteria are slowly, in a trivial manner, eating at the internal metal structures of the ISS.
2) Dust does not settle in the ISS - but it accumulates in the HVAC and air handling system. Contrast this to the Earth scenario where gravity causes deposition of the dust - shredded skin cells and small debris. I would imagine a half-way scenario will exist on Mars - where the lower gravity will still cause dust deposition but - depending on where the air vents are in the room, could gather more or less dust in there because of the lower gravity environment.
These two points are both concerns for long term human occupation. Having a space that is designed to avoid accumulation of bacteria and microbes, and one that is more simple to give a deep clean is essential.
Population of the colony - Timelines
The precise number of people who ever lived aboard the ISS: 240 people. It doesn't sound like a lot does it. There are only slightly fewer people in the starting line up of all the Premier League teams combined. This underscores the point that delivering people to Space is limited. This is because manufacturing is hard. Which makes it expensive.
Developing a trans-planetary human vehicle system is hard.
Establishing a colony on Mars - will be hard - but possible.
Scaling the advent of human travel beyond Earth is hard.
I feel that solving this challenge will be akin to the onset of smart-phones into everyday life, albeit on smaller scale. The trend really didn't take off until the late 2000's.
With approximately 80% of the initial global take-up achieved in the 5 years between 2011 and 2015. We are starting to see this as well with electric vehicle take up as Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) vehicles start to lose favour among a locked-down, and remote-work favouring population. Exponential growth or s-curves are slow to start with, but then the charts start to turn parabolic. This is when linear and exponential growth start to distinguish themselves quite distinctly.
What does this have to do with Martian colonisation? Let's get back to it --> in the same way that more smartphones got into peoples hands, so too, we will as a species, will have to drive the progress to get humans to Mars. There was an excellent youtube supercut of SpaceX visuals, covering the first 10,000 days. In this video, Venture City some overlaid progression of the population on Mars, accounting for colonist rotations.
In contrast to the observed Smartphone roll-out and aggressive take up within a decade, the Mars mission will happen differently. Firstly, because Mars has a year cycle approximately twice that of Earth. As a result, adding new colonists will not be possible every year, and they will arrive even 2 years.
You can reach me on Twitter: @Ronnie_Writes
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