Tuesday, October 13, 2015

Mars Colony Transfer Habitat Design Preview

This week at the IAC2015 meeting in Jerusalem, we will be presenting an update on our torpor research, including the system design for our Mars colony transit habitat - capable of delivering 100 people to Mars. Preview image!

Mars Colony Torpor Transfer Habitat
This module is designed to maintain 48 people in stasis during the transit phase to Mars. For a typical Mars mission, we would use two of these modules and one non-torpor habitat with 4 active crewmember/caretakers, for a total of 100 passengers delivered in a single mission.

I'll post the technical paper and presentation here once the conference has concluded.
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6 comments:

  1. UnknownOctober 31, 2015 at 8:09 AM

    Nice information and Unbelievable Pictures by NASA

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  2. UnknownDecember 1, 2015 at 8:52 AM

    Great job! Why is too little information in the daily news? Keep it up!

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  3. Mike SkoglundDecember 9, 2015 at 3:38 AM

    I hope the conference went well for you. With the conference now concluded, when do you plan to make the paper and presentation available?

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  4. John BradfordDecember 9, 2015 at 5:53 AM

    Conference was great! During the presentation, Mark Schaffer had to field some questions from Buzz Aldrin. I think Buzz's preference is to fly the ship to Mars himself though :)

    Paper and presentation are available online now!

    http://www.sei.aero/eng/papers/uploads/archive/IAC-15-A5.2.12%20100%20Person%20Torpor%20Presentation%2010162015.pdf

    http://www.sei.aero/eng/papers/uploads/archive/IAC-15-A5.2.12%20100%20Person%20Torpor%2010162015.pdf

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    Replies
    1. Mike SkoglundDecember 11, 2015 at 2:42 PM

      Thank you, Dr. Bradford. Obviously an intriguing concept. I applaud you and your colleagues for being willing to press forward a concept that is both novel and highly challenging to status-quo views on intermediate-term manned spaceflight. It's not easy to be far out in front of the pack in any professional endeavor. I suspect that the issues around human trials of medical intervention of this type on healthy subjects may be the biggest barrier and biggest completion risk to a project of this type, as opposed to the technological issues. Related to that is the likelihood that the technology would have to achieve a 99.9% rate of successful torpor without meaningful intermediate to long term side effects, before NASA or similar agencies would entrust the success of a multi-billion dollar mission to it. Getting past both of those issues in a time frame that lines up with initial manned travel to Mars is not a small challenge. Secondarily, this will almost surely be a challenge to sell to the customary psychological types in the astronaut corps - you'd be dealing with people who are accustomed to high levels of personal control.

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  5. Tony M.January 23, 2017 at 3:02 PM

    Good post.

    ReplyDelete

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