Mars Direct:
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Blue Sky Opportunities in Mining:
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This review is part of a collection written for the Futurian Society of Sydney, other Futurian-related stuff can be found at my page for such things, other non-Futurian related stuff can be found at my home page.
| In March 2000, Robert Zubrin gave a lecture on his "Mars Direct" scheme for a manned mission to Mars. It's the sort of talk I might normally write up. But in this particular case there seemed no point, Zubrin's thoughts on the matter being very well-published already. | The next day, Bill Zealey spoke on mining comets and asteroids. This is a subject I think much more relevant to the future of the human race than anything to do with Mars. |
So the plan is to write up both talks, and see where that leads me. I have no idea how well it will turn out. Comparing two different speakers and two different ideas is intrinsically unfair, and I wouldn't want to give the impression it was sensible. I've split the review up by field of human knowledge.
| Robert Zubrin is a professional spacecraft design engineer, and was quick to emphasise it. He used to work for Martin Marietta, which subsequently got merged into "Lock-Mart" (aka Lockheed-Martin, the largest military contractor in the world) along with half the free world's large scale merchants of death (the other half now belong to Raytheon). Today, Robery Zubrin has his own company called Pioneer. He has exactly the qualifications you'd want for the job, and was signing copies of his book on the subject. |
Bill Zealey, on the other hand, is an astrophysicist specialising in star formation
and infra-red. He has a silent (i.e. non-speaking) partner called Mark Somter who
is a mining engineer, but neither has any experience with space engineering. They're
semi-amateurs, and not afraid to admit it.
For Zealey this seems to be something between a sideline and a hobby. Somter probably feels a bit more strongly, it's hard to be sure. |
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Mars Direct got its start when George Bush decided he was John F. Kennedy. Lacking
any agreeable blonde movie stars to bed, and having lived in Texas for years without
being shot at even once, he announced a plan to send humans to Mars. Unfortunately
not all of them were democrats and so he had to bring them back.
Using the NASA plan of the time, this would cost an absolute fortune. Zubrin refers to plans of this ilk as "the parallel universe". He sees them as methods, not of getting to Mars, but of satisfying a childhood yearning for fleets of enormous interplanetary spacecraft. A group of engineers at Martin Marietta proposed an alternative, ancestor of Zubrin's present day Mars Direct program. But by that time the NASA version had hit congress and put them into a fit of "sticker shock". The program was killed. Zubrin has been pushing to get his version running ever since, and has had some success: getting the core of Mars Direct made NASA policy, for instance, and gaining financial support from a billionaire. | Bill Zealey got involved in his project when Mark Somter called him. In fact, Mark Somter seems to be the main driving force, having written a book on asteroid mining and taken leave from Western Mining Corporation to work on it. Somter did a thesis on the project for a higher degree in engineering. |
| Zubrin's key philosophy is to live off the land, in the fashion of successful explorers, rather than try to take everything with him, in the style of unsuccessful explorers. He uses the gedankenexperiment of asking how well Lewis and Clark's crossing of the (present-day) United States would have gone, had they tried to carry with them all their food. He also raised Burke and Wills, seeming to assume they were the Australian equivalent of Lewis and Clark, and apparently unaware that nearly all the expedition had died. But perhaps that just makes them even better advertisements for Mars Direct. | I'm not sure Zealey has a philosophy. He's just interested in mining comets. |
The central physical principles for Mars Direct are:
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The central physics behind Zealey's idea is the depth of the Earth's gravity well, or, equivalently, the Earth's escape velocity.
Time out for a pet hate. In physics, velocity is used to describe vector quantities, that is, those with direction, while speed is used to describe scalar quantities, that is, those without direction. So a ship's speed might be "25 knots", and its velocity would be "25 knots southeast". Escape velocity is, in fact, a scalar quantity. It may seem counterintuitive but it doesn't matter which way you're going ... well, as long as it isn't toward the planet. So it really should be called "escape speed", rather than "escape velocity". But for some reason, I suspect because velocity sounds more scientific, "escape velocity" has stuck. Anyway, it's big. This prompts Bill to think that any comparatively free source of useful stuff already outside Earth's gravity well ought to be exploited. |
| Zubrin seems free of legal entanglements. | Zealey is OK as long as he moves to America. The US is one of the few states in the world that declined to sign a key United Nations treaty on the exploitation of resources in space. This treaty said that such resources belonged to humanity at large (what, aliens don't get a say?) and so nobody could mine them without permission. |
| No surprise that Zubrin has put a lot of work into details of the spacecraft design. |
Most of the engineering detail seems to be on the mining end of the operation, probably supplied by Mark Somter. Zealey has put some work into creating low density comet core simulants, on which to perform mining experiments. On the other hand he put very little into the question of what to do
with the stuff once he had it in low earth orbit, making only a few vague remarks about transferring it at "some kind of space station".
His main reason for preferring ice as the first product is ease of extraction. No complicated chemistry, or reducing rock to rubble, is needed. Just vapourise the ice and condense it onto a cold finger. He discussed several methods of doing this, but they all had unresolved issues. |
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In the short term Zubrin isn't into economics, except in the sense that he wants to keep it cheap.
It's a science mission.
In the longer term, I think his economics is weak. When I say weak, of course, I mean "taken leave of its senses". Zubrin sees Mars as a North America to plunder, but it's much harder to identify a useful economic activity for twenty-first century Earthlings on Mars than it would have been to identify one for sixteenth century Europeans in North America. | Zealey says that it costs about US$10K to deliver a kilogram of stuff to low earth orbit. The market for volatiles in low earth orbit is about $US2G a year, and growing. One load of volatiles brought back to low Earth orbit would flood the market for a long time. Hopefully, people would find new and exciting projects that needed lots of volatiles. |
| Zubrin's long-term plans are permanent colonies on Mars, and terraforming. I think he's lost it here, for reasons I've stated elsewhere. Also, I'm unable to identify anything it would be worth making on Mars and shipping back to Earth. OK, perhaps I'm just too short-sighted to see what Mars' products will be. But I can't help thinking that the European colonists of America would have found it much easier to name some commodities.For starters, one could live in America doing more or less what most people did for a living in Europe – farming. Martian colonists, on the other hand, probably won't be doing anything half as productive (from Earth's point of view) as they were back home. | Some of Zealey's longer term plans include mining for metals as well as volatiles, and perhaps even mining for use on Earth rather than in orbit. He suggests the most lucrative industry might be orbital bombardment blackmail. |
| Zubrin is hooked into the great European Age of Exploration as his mythic basis. In Zubrin's model, the Moon is an analogue of Greenland, relatively close to the Earth (i.e. Europe) but basically barren. The asteroids are the West Indies, possibly very lucrative but never self-supporting. And Mars is North America, future beacon of hope for an ossifying Earth. | I don't think Zealey has a mythic approach. He did, however, briefly mention other peoples' myths. Specifically, those manufactured in that great engine of the mythic industry, Hollywood. Asteroids and comets, he says, are seen by Hollywood purely as threats. He wants them to be seen as bonanzas. |
Zubrin has some cash from the
Golden Apples Transport Company,
the space exploration vehicle of a gonzo bllionaire. His book offers three models for funding the trip:
| Zealey doesn't have any cash for this, but I'm sure he'd be happy if you'd like to give him some. |
| Yes, but only when you dig into his deeper fantasies. In normal conversation he seems hyper-rational, chances are the veneer will see him through. | No sign of it. As far as I can tell, just a good solid chap who likes digging things up out of asteroids. More power to him. |