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Fiction Science Club

Get a reality check on plans to build cities in space

Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos may harbor multibillion-dollar dreams of sending millions of people to live on Mars, on the moon and inside free-flying space habitats — but a newly published book provides a prudent piece of advice: Don’t go too boldly.

It’s advice that Kelly and Zach Weinersmith didn’t expect they’d be giving when they began to work on their book, titled “A City on Mars.” They thought they’d be writing a guide to the golden age of space settlement that Musk and Bezos were promising.

“We ended up doing a ton of research on space settlements from just every angle you can imagine,” Zach Weinersmith says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast. “This was a four-year research project. And about two and a half years in, we went from being fairly optimistic about it as a desirable, near-term likely possibility [to] probably unlikely in the near term, and possibly undesirable in the near term. So it was quite a change. Slightly traumatic, I would say.”

The Weinersmiths found that there was precious little research into the potential long-term health effects of living on the moon or Mars — and zero research into the potential effects on human reproduction and development. Moreover, the legal uncertainties surrounding property rights in space seemed likely to lead to disputes that would tie diplomats and military planners in knots.

“In our effort to create Mars settlements to make a Plan B, to make ourselves safer as a species, are we actually lowering existential risk?” Zach says. “I think it’s absolutely unclear — and there’s a good argument that we might even increase it.”

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GeekWire

Mars Society unveils plan for Mars Technology Institute

The nonprofit Mars Society is getting set to take the next giant leap in its mission to support Red Planet exploration and settlement, by establishing a Mars Technology Institute to develop the tools and processes those settlers will need.

Robert Zubrin, the Mars Society’s founder and president, outlined the plan today during the advocacy group’s Red Planet Live podcast.

Many of the details in that plan still have to be fleshed out — including sources of funding, the precise structure of the organization, and where the institute will be headquartered. But the Pacific Northwest is one of the top prospects for the institute’s center, along with Colorado, the longtime home of the Mars Society.

During the podcast, Zubrin touted the Seattle area’s array of biotech and AI ventures, as well as its quality of life. “The Pacific Northwest is perhaps at the top of the list,” he said. “Colorado’s an alternative.”

He said the Mars Technology Institute will complement the efforts of NASA and other space agencies, and follow through on SpaceX founder Elon Musk’s vision to make humanity a multiplanet species.

“SpaceX and other entrepreneurial launch companies are already moving rapidly to develop the transportation systems that can get us to the planet Mars,” Zubrin said in a news release. “What is needed is an institution devoted to developing the technologies that will allow us to live once we are there.”

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GeekWire

Blue Origin wins a launch order for NASA Mars mission

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture has won its first NASA order for a New Glenn rocket launch, with Mars as the mission’s ultimate destination.

The task order calls on Kent, Wash.-based Blue Origin to provide launch service for NASA’s Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers, or ESCAPADE, as part of the space agency’s Venture-Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare program, also known as VADR.

Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, which is currently still under development, would be tasked with sending two robotic probes spaceward from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida in late 2024.

The twin ESCAPADE spacecraft would study how Mars’ weak magnetosphere interacts with the solar wind, and how energy and plasma enter and leave the magnetosphere. The cruise to Mars would take about 11 months, followed by several months of orbital adjustments in preparation for the science mission.

Learning about Mars’ magnetosphere would provide a new perspective on space weather, on strategies for protecting astronauts from space storms — and potentially on the evolution of the Red Planet’s climate. Scientists say Mars lost much of its atmosphere and became less hospitable for life because it didn’t have a strong magnetosphere to protect it from the stripping-away effect of the solar wind.

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GeekWire

NASA calls an end to Mars InSight lander’s mission

Four years after engineers cheered the landing of the robotic InSight spacecraft on Mars, NASA today declared an end to the $830 million quake-detecting mission.

In a mission update, NASA said the control team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory failed to contact the lander in two consecutive attempts — which had previously been set as the criterion for ending the mission. Dust had been building up on the probe’s solar panels, and mission planners concluded that the batteries finally ran out of power. The last time NASA heard from Mars InSight was on Dec. 15.

JPL’s Deep Space Network will continue to listen for signals from the spacecraft, but further contact is considered unlikely.

Those involved in the mission chose to concentrate on InSight’s achievements rather than its setbacks. InSight’s primary purpose was to record seismic readings emanating from the Red Planet’s interior. The mission detected 1,319 Marsquakes in all, including quakes caused by meteor impacts. In May, the spacecraft’s seismometer recorded the largest quake ever detected on a planet other than Earth.

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Fiction Science Club

‘Maurice on Mars’ brings black comedy to the Red Planet

The world’s richest human wants to build a city on Mars: Fifty years ago, Elon Musk’s vision of our future on the Red Planet might have sounded like science fiction — but today, Musk is actually serious about the idea of using billions of dollars from ventures like SpaceX’s Starlink broadband network to finance the move to Mars.

“In looking in the long term, and saying what’s needed to create a city on Mars, well, one thing’s for sure: a lot of money,” Musk said back in 2015. “So we need things that will generate a lot of money.”

What kind of city would Musk want to see on Mars? His vision calls for a place that offers “everything from iron foundries to pizza joints to nightclubs” while getting rid of “special interests and coercion of politicians.” But what if cities on Mars turn out like cities on Earth, complete with wealth disparity, racism — and ambitious billionaires?

That’s the premise for “Maurice on Mars,” a darkly funny series of animated shorts created and written by comedian and TV writer Tim Barnes for Comedy Central’s Animated YouTube channel.

“I truly think that people often jump to that aspirational part of living on Mars,” Barnes says in the latest episode of Fiction Science, a podcast focusing on the intersection of science and fiction. “But the practical thing is that you’re going to need people to build stuff once you get there. So the working class, the underclass, I believe will be the first people on Mars to actually build the White House there.”

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Cosmic Space

‘Martian Flower’ blooms in a Red Planet menagerie

A weird shape spotted on the surface of Mars may look like an agave plant, a starfish, fossilized coral or even an infant Demogorgon, but experts say there’s a perfectly natural explanation for the object that’s been dubbed a “Martian Flower.”

The tiny multi-branched shape was captured in images from the ChemCam and Mars Hand Lens Imager on NASA’s Curiosity rover, which has been operating for nearly 10 years in Gale Crater on Mars.

It’s the latest in a succession of weird bits of stuff that have turned up amid the thousands of pictures sent back to Earth by robotic Red Planet probes. Other examples include a skull-shaped rock, an alien footprint (actually, a wheelprint), the Mermaid on Mars, the Mars rat, Martian macaroni (a.k.a. rover rotini) Curiosity’s plastic shred, Phoenix’s sprung spring and Opportunity’s bunny ears.

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Universe Today

Elon Musk updates his vision for SpaceX’s Starship

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has laid out a scenario for space travel that calls for his company’s Starship launch system to take on its first orbital test flight as soon as January.

Starship could go through “a dozen launches next year, maybe more,” and be ready to send valuable payloads to the moon, Mars and even the solar system’s outer planets by 2023, Musk said today during an online meeting of the National Academies’ Space Studies Board and Board on Physics and Astronomy.

But he advised against sending anything too valuable on the first flight to Mars. “I would recommend putting the lower-cost scientific mission stuff on the first mission,” he said, half-jokingly.

The National Academies presentation followed up on big-picture talks that Musk delivered in 2016 (when Starship was known as the Interplanetary Transport System), 2017 (when it was known as the BFR or “Big Frickin’ Rocket”) and 2018 (when Musk settled on “Starship”).

Musk’s basic concept is the same: Starship and its giant Super Heavy booster would be a one-size-fits-all system that could be used for point-to-point suborbital travel, orbital space missions and all manner of trips beyond Earth orbit, including moon landings. It’d be capable of lofting more than 100 tons to low Earth orbit (three times as much as the space shuttle), and sending 100 people at a time to Mars.

This week’s presentation provided some new details.

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GeekWire

Mockups of Mars machines are going on a road trip

Seattle’s Museum of Flight says it’ll serve as the first stop on a road trip for NASA’s full-scale replicas of the Perseverance rover and the Ingenuity helicopter — display versions of the hardware that’s currently at work on Mars, 242 million miles away.

The SUV-sized rover and its drone-sized piggyback copter landed on the Red Planet in February, and since then they’ve both been surveying the terrain of Jezero Crater, which scientists suspect harbored a potentially habitable lake in ancient times. The Ingenuity helicopter began taking on exploratory flights in April.

The mockups are due to go on display in the Museum of Flight’s Charles Simonyi Space Gallery on Oct. 30. Representatives from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory will be on hand for the opening, which marks the kickoff of NASA’s yearlong “Roving With Perseverance” museum roadshow.

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Cosmic Space

China’s Mars pictures fuel NASA’s funding pitch

The first pictures from a Chinese probe on the surface of Mars were released today, sparking a plea from NASA’s recently appointed chief for more funding to keep America in the lead on the space frontier.

China’s Zhurong rover, which landed on the Red Planet on May 14, sent back pictures as it sat atop its landing platform on the flat plain of Utopia Planitia. One picture provides a rover’s-eye view of the ramp that the six-wheeled robot will use to roll down onto the surface.

The probe also sent back video clips that were captured by China’s Tianwen-1 orbiter during the lander’s separation.

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Cosmic Space

Chinese probe touches down safely on Mars

China scored another first for its space program today with the safe landing of the Tianwen-1 mission’s lander and rover on Mars.

“It is the first time China has landed a probe on a planet other than Earth,” China’s official Xinhua news agency reported.

The lander-rover spacecraft was brought to Mars aboard China’s Tianwen-1 orbiter, which was launched last July and made its Red Planet rendezvous in February. For weeks, scientists used the orbiter to scout out potential landing sites, and settled on Utopia Planitia, the same plain where NASA’s Viking 2 lander touched down in 1976.