Woodward Academy 2011-2012 File Title
Plan Plan: The United States federal government should settle Mars. 1AC—Solvency
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- And Mars is the only place in the solar system that can support civilization—natural resource abundance. The Moon is deficient.
- Mars col provides cheap access to space—tech spin offs
- The colonization of Mars is thus central to the development of the technologies that will give us cheap access to space
- It is only when dose rates occur at a pace that overwhelms these self-repair mechanisms that severe health impacts occur
- near total recovery of the musculature and immune system occurs
- they are not too extreme
PlanPlan: The United States federal government should settle Mars. 1AC—SolvencyContention Two is Solvency: Here is the description of the mission Zubrin 5—an astronautical engineer and author, is president of Pioneer Astronautics, a research and development firm, and president of the Mars Society, a space advocacy group [Spring 2005, Robert Zubrin, “Getting Space Exploration Right,” The New Atlantis, Number 8, pp. 15-48, http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/getting-space-exploration-right] How Do We Get There? Some may say that human exploration of Mars is too ambitious a feat to select as our near-term goal, but that is the view of the faint of heart. From the technological point of view, we’re ready. Despite the greater distance to Mars, we are much better prepared today to send humans to Mars than we were to launch humans to the Moon in 1961 when John F. Kennedy challenged the nation to achieve that goal—and we got there eight years later. Given the will, we could have our first teams on Mars within a decade. The key to success is rejecting the policy of continued stagnation represented by senile Shuttle Mode thinking, and returning to the destination-driven Apollo Mode of planned operation that allowed the space agency to perform so brilliantly during its youth. In addition, we must take a lesson from our own pioneer past and adopt a “travel light and live off the land” mission strategy similar to that which has well-served terrestrial explorers for centuries. The plan to explore the Red Planet in this way is known as Mars Direct. Here’s how it could be accomplished. At an early launch opportunity—for example 2014—a single heavy lift booster with a capability equal to that of the Saturn V used during the Apollo program is launched off Cape Canaveral and uses its upper stage to throw a 40-tonne unmanned payload onto a trajectory to Mars. (A “tonne” is one metric ton.) Arriving at Mars eight months later, the spacecraft uses friction between its aeroshield and the Martian atmosphere to brake itself into orbit around the planet, and then lands with the help of a parachute. This is the Earth Return Vehicle (ERV). It flies out to Mars with its two methane/oxygen driven rocket propulsion stages unfueled. It also carries six tonnes of liquid hydrogen, a 100-kilowatt nuclear reactor mounted in the back of a methane/oxygen driven light truck, a small set of compressors and an automated chemical processing unit, and axx few small scientific rovers. As soon as the craft lands successfully, the truck is telerobotically driven a few hundred meters away from the site, and the reactor is deployed to provide power to the compressors and chemical processing unit. The ERV will then start a ten-month process of fueling itself by combining the hydrogen brought from Earth with the carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere. The end result is a total of 108 tonnes of methane/oxygen rocket propellant. Ninety-six tonnes of the propellant will be used to fuel the ERV, while 12 tonnes will be available to support the use of high-powered, chemically-fueled, long-range ground vehicles. Large additional stockpiles of oxygen can also be produced, both for breathing and for turning into water by combination with hydrogen brought from Earth. Since water is 89 percent oxygen (by weight), and since the larger part of most foodstuffs is water, this greatly reduces the amount of life support consumables that need to be hauled from Earth. With the propellant production successfully completed, in 2016 two more boosters lift off from Cape Canaveral and throw their 40-tonne payloads towards Mars. One of the payloads is an unmanned fuel-factory/ERV just like the one launched in 2014; the other is a habitation module carrying a small crew, a mixture of whole food and dehydrated provisions sufficient for three years, and a pressurized methane/oxygen-powered ground rover. Upon arrival, the manned craft lands at the 2014 landing site where a fully fueled ERV and beaconed landing site await it. With the help of such navigational aids, the crew should be able to land right on the spot; but if the landing is off course by tens or even hundreds of kilometers, the crew can still achieve the surface rendezvous by driving over in their rover. If they are off by thousands of kilometers, the second ERV provides a backup. Assuming the crew lands and rendezvous as planned at site number one, the second ERV will land several hundred kilometers away to start making propellant for the 2018 mission, which in turn will fly out with an additional ERV to open up Mars landing site number three. Thus, every other year two heavy lift boosters are launched, one to land a crew, and the other to prepare a site for the next mission, for an average launch rate of just one booster per year to pursue a continuing program of Mars exploration. Since in a normal year we can launch about six shuttle stacks, this would only represent about 16 percent of the U.S. heavy-lift capability, and would clearly be affordable. In effect, this “live off the land” approach removes the manned Mars mission from the realm of mega-spacecraft fantasy and reduces it in practice to a task of comparable difficulty to that faced in launching the Apollo missions to the Moon. The crew will stay on the surface for 1.5 years, taking advantage of the mobility afforded by the high-powered chemically-driven ground vehicles to accomplish a great deal of surface exploration. With a 12-tonne surface fuel stockpile, they have the capability for over 24,000 kilometers worth of traverse before they leave, giving them the kind of mobility necessary to conduct a serious search for evidence of past or present life on Mars. Since no one has been left in orbit, the entire crew will have available to them the natural gravity and protection against cosmic rays and solar radiation afforded by the Martian environment, and thus there will not be the strong pressure for a quick return to Earth that plagues other Mars mission plans based upon orbiting mother-ships with small landing parties. At the conclusion of their stay, the crew returns to Earth in a direct flight from the Martian surface in the ERV. As the series of missions progresses, a string of small bases is left behind on the Martian surface, opening up broad stretches of territory to human cognizance. In essence, by taking advantage of the most obvious local resource available on Mars—its atmosphere—the plan allows us to accomplish a manned Mars mission with what amounts to a lunar-class transportation system. By eliminating any requirement to introduce a new order of technology and complexity of operations beyond those needed for lunar transportation to accomplish piloted Mars missions, the plan can reduce costs by an order of magnitude and advance the schedule for the human exploration of Mars by a generation. And Mars is the only place in the solar system that can support civilization—natural resource abundance. The Moon is deficient. Zubrin 11—formerly a senior astronautical engineer at Lockheed Martin, chairman of the executive committee of the National Space Society, President of Pioneer Astronautics, a space-exploration research and development firm, and president of the Mars Society, a space advocacy group [Robert Zubrin, “8: THE COLONIZATION OF MARS,” Chapter 8, The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must, Simon & Schuster, Inc., ISBN-10: 145160811X, Publication Date: June 28, 2011, pg. Kindle] Among extraterrestrial bodies in our solar system, Mars is singular in that it possesses all the raw materials required to support not only life, but a new branch of human civilization. This uniqueness is illustrated most clearly if we contrast Mars with the Earth’s Moon, the most frequently cited alternative location for extraterrestrial human colonization. In contrast to the Moon, Mars is rich in carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen, all in biologically readily accessible forms such as carbon dioxide gas, nitrogen gas, and water ice and permafrost. Carbon and nitrogen are only present on the Moon in parts-per-million quantities. There is some water ice, but only in permanently shaded ultracold (−230°C) polar craters—locations so frigid as to make their contents virtually inaccessible outside of such environments. Oxygen is abundant, but only in tightly bound oxides such as silicon dioxide (SiO2), ferrous oxide (Fe2O3), magnesium oxide (MgO), and alumina oxide (Al2O3), which require very high energy processes to reduce. Current knowledge indicates that if Mars were smooth and all its ice and permafrost melted into liquid water, the entire planet would be covered with an ocean over 100 meters deep. This contrasts strongly with the Moon, which is so dry that if concrete were found there, lunar colonists would mine it to get the water out. Thus, if plants could be grown in greenhouses on the Moon (an unlikely proposition, as we’ve seen) most of their biomass material would have to be imported. The Moon is also deficient in about half the metals of interest to industrial society (copper, nickel, and zinc, for example), as well as many other elements of interest such as sulfur, fluorine, bromine, phosphorus, and chlorine. Mars has every required element in abundance. Moreover, on Mars, as on Earth, hydrologic and volcanic processes have occurred that are likely to have consolidated various elements into local concentrations of high-grade mineral ore. Indeed, the geologic history of Mars has been compared to that of Africa,43 with very optimistic implications as to its mineral wealth as a corollary. In contrast, the Moon has had virtually no history of water or volcanic action, with the result that it is basically composed of trash rocks with very little differentiation into ores that represent useful concentrations of anything interesting. Mars col provides cheap access to space—tech spin offs Zubrin 11—formerly a senior astronautical engineer at Lockheed Martin, chairman of the executive committee of the National Space Society, President of Pioneer Astronautics, a space-exploration research and development firm, and president of the Mars Society, a space advocacy group [Robert Zubrin, “8: THE COLONIZATION OF MARS,” Chapter 8, The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must, Simon & Schuster, Inc., ISBN-10: 145160811X, Publication Date: June 28, 2011, pg. Kindle] AIR-BREATHING LAUNCH SYSTEMS Current rocket-based launch systems are only about 2 percent as efficient in hauling cargo as jet aircraft. The reason for this difference is simple—rockets haul their own oxidizer while jets get theirs from the air. Since the oxidizer makes up about 75 percent of the total propellant weight, this enormously compromises a rocket vehicle’s performance. Launch vehicles attempting to reach orbit are flying through an ocean of oxidizer. Why don’t they try to use any of it? Unfortunately, technical difficulties and lack of will have intersected to stall the development of hypersonic air-breathing propulsion. Current ramjet engines used on some missiles can make it to Mach 5.5, but beyond this speed it becomes impossible to slow the air that enters the jet engine to subsonic speeds without heating the air too much in the process. Thus, the combustion inside the engine must take place in a supersonic flow. An engine that can do this is a new type of animal, a “scramjet,” and is in a sense as much of an advance over existing jet engines as jets were over propellers. The National Aerospace Plane (NASP) program—canceled in 1993 due to lack of perceived necessity—conducted extensive computer calculations showing that scramjets will work. A somewhat less technologically challenging approach that can obtain much of the scramjet’s benefits is the air-augmented rocket: a rocket that obtains part of its needed oxidizer from the atmosphere during its upward flight. Air-augmented rockets that could get a specific impulse over 1,000 seconds were demonstrated on the test stand at The Marquardt Company in 1966. Unfortunately, a change in governmental bureaucratic whims canceled the program before the engines could be flight tested. The use of scramjets or air-augmented rockets on even part of the launch trajectory of a single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO) vehicle would greatly increase its payload. This is exactly what is needed to meet the logistics demands of a developing Mars settlement, which will call for the cheap delivery of large amounts of cargo to orbit, and beyond. The colonization of Mars is thus central to the development of the technologies that will give us cheap access to space. And No impact to radiation—low dose rates Zubrin 11—formerly a senior astronautical engineer at Lockheed Martin, chairman of the executive committee of the National Space Society, President of Pioneer Astronautics, a space-exploration research and development firm, and president of the Mars Society, a space advocacy group [Robert Zubrin, “5: KILLING THE DRAGONS, AVOIDING THE SIRENS,” Chapter 5, The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must, Simon & Schuster, Inc., ISBN-10: 145160811X, Publication Date: June 28, 2011, pg. Kindle] RADIATION HAZARDS One of the leading dragons barring the path to Mars goes by the name radiation. Radiation is deadly, we are told, and only by using ultrafast spacecraft that can speed through the supposedly radiation-infested seas of space in impossibly short times can we be sure of a safe voyage. Or alternatively, we are told that only by using huge spacecraft with masses approaching those of asteroids can we shield the crew well enough to assure their health. We are further warned that cosmic radiation is something totally new in character, and only after we have spent decades studying its long-term effects on humans in interplanetary space can a trip to Mars be risked.
That said, it is certainly true that very large amounts of radiation delivered over very short amounts of time, such as the exposure to a huge dose within seconds via the gamma-ray flash from an atomic bomb blast, or within minutes by exposure to unshielded release products from a disabled nuclear reactor, can and will kill. The effects of such prompt doses of radiation are well-known from studies of the victims of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. These studies have revealed that prompt doses of less than 75 rem result in no apparent health effects. If the doses are between 75 and 200 rem, radiation sickness (whose symptoms are vomiting, fatigue, and loss of appetite) will appear in from 5 percent to 50 percent of exposed individuals, with the percentages increasing from the low to high end of this range as the dose increases from 75 to 200 rem. At this level of exposure almost everyone recovers within a few weeks. At 300 rem, radiation sickness is universal, and some fatalities start to appear, rising to 50 percent at 450 rem and 80 percent at 600 rem. Almost no one survives doses of 1,000 rem or more. These, however, are the effects of prompt doses, which is to say doses that occur on a time scale much shorter than the weeks-to-months time scale for cellular reproduction and bodily self-repair. The situation is much like drinking alcohol or any other chemical toxin. A man could drink a martini a night for years and suffer no obvious ill effects, his liver having adequate time to cleanse his body after each drink. Drinking a hundred martinis in a single night, though, would kill him. Similarly, radiation causes damage to living organisms by inducing chemical reactions within cells that create toxic substances that can kill or otherwise derange individual cells. Below a certain dose rate, the self-repair capabilities of individual cells can act fast enough to reject the radiation-induced toxin and save the cell. At significantly higher rates, human body tissues acting as a whole are able to generate replacement cells for those that have become casualties, before the loss of those cells causes problems for the body as a whole. It is only when dose rates occur at a pace that overwhelms these self-repair mechanisms that severe health impacts occur. And No impact to zero gravity—empirics prove astronauts always recover Zubrin 11—formerly a senior astronautical engineer at Lockheed Martin, chairman of the executive committee of the National Space Society, President of Pioneer Astronautics, a space-exploration research and development firm, and president of the Mars Society, a space advocacy group [Robert Zubrin, “5: KILLING THE DRAGONS, AVOIDING THE SIRENS,” Chapter 5, The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must, Simon & Schuster, Inc., ISBN-10: 145160811X, Publication Date: June 28, 2011, pg. Kindle] ZERO GRAVITY Another dragon barring the path to Mars is the menace of zero gravity. Long-duration exposure to zero gravity carries the risk of serious deterioration of human muscles and bone tissue, we are told, and, therefore, before astronauts go to Mars we must undertake a long-term program of experimentation with human subjects exposed to extended periods of zero gravity on board the Space Station. This program will require several decades, many billions of dollars in “microgravity life science research,” and a few dozen human beings willing to sacrifice their health to “scientific research.” I find this argument bizarre. Now, it is certainly true that spending long periods in zero gravity will cause cardiovascular deterioration, decalcification and demineralization of the bones, and a general deterioration of muscular fitness due to lack of exercise. Zero gravity also depresses some aspects of the body’s immune system. These effects are well documented from the experiences not only of the U.S. Skylab astronauts, who spent up to three months at a time on-orbit, and crews on the International Space Station, whose standard rotation lasts six months, but of Soviet cosmonauts, some of whom have spent stints in zero gravity on their Mir space station of almost eighteen months—nearly three times the duration of the trans-Mars or trans-Earth cruises required to perform the Mars Direct mission. In all cases, near total recovery of the musculature and immune system occurs after reentry and reconditioning to a one-gravity environment on Earth. The demineralization of the bones ceases upon return to Earth, but actual restoration of the bones to preflight condition appears to be a very extended process. The Soviets have experimented with various countermeasures to zero gravity, including intensive exercise, drugs, and elastic “penguin suits” that force the body to exert significant physical effort in the course of routine movement. As might be expected, programs of intensive (three hours a day) exercise have proven effective in reducing general muscular deconditioning, and to some extent cardiovascular deterioration, but countermeasures taken to date have shown little benefit in slowing bone demineralization. It should be understood that while these effects are all quite tangible and definitely not desirable, they are not too extreme; in no case have such zero-gravity “adaptations” prevented astronauts or cosmonauts from satisfactorily performing their duties while they are in the zero-gravity environment, and after even the longest flights, crew members recovered enough to become basically functional again within 48 hours after landing. Indeed, within a week of landing, the members of the 84-day Skylab 3 crew were able to play strong games of tennis. The recovery time to functionality upon Mars arrival after a six-month zero-gravity exposure should be swifter, because the crew will only have to deal with reacclimation to Mars’ 0.38g environment after landing, instead of the 1g shock experienced after reentry on Earth. The point, however, is that an awful lot of research has already been done in this area, and we know what the effects are. Given that is the case, we can rightly ask whether it is necessary, or even ethical, to subject further astronaut crews to such experimentation solely for the purpose of more exhaustive research on zero-gravity health deterioration effects. I don’t think it is. In fact, given what we know today, I’d have to classify the proposed program of continued experimentation on humans with long duration zero-gravity health effects as unethical and worthless, and I know a lot of astronauts who agree with me on that point. It just doesn’t make sense to expose dozens of astronauts to a larger zero-gravity dose than a Mars mission might provide in order to “ensure the safety” of a much smaller crew who actually fly there. Doing so is like training bomber pilots by having them fly their planes through real flak. If you are willing to accept the health consequences of long-duration exposure to zero gravity, you might as well take your licks in the process of actually getting to Mars. 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