Living on Mars
I was born a few weeks before Sputnik was launched. I followed the manned space program through the 1960’s with great enthusiasm and watched the moon landing of Apollo 11 live on a black and white television in 1969. At the time we were inundated with breathless descriptions of the Saturn V launch vehicle in terms of its size. Big, huge and colossal were some of the adjectives. Eventually I got to see the Saturn V rocket lying on its side on static display at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, TX. The first stage engines were quite impressive. Yes, the rocket was (is) pretty big, but it was still small enough to be on the human scale. It’s not that I was disappointed- I wasn’t. But it was a smaller kind of behemoth than I had imagined.
As I grew older I became a Trekkie and watched the reruns and new series religiously. I began to believe in “The Federation” as a model of civilization could be a viable thing us, except for transporters, phasors and warp speed. Flying lessons and a steady diet of sci-fi novels kept my mind on space.
Today I am still interested in all sorts of aerospace technology. Except one. That would be Elon Musk’s plan to settle Mars. It is hard to doubt his sincerity in wanting to do it and SpaceX is making progress in that direction. There are many good reasons for a manned Mars landing and exploration. But, permanent settlement is a very different matter. I’m thinking primarily about mining, metallurgy and agriculture.
A rock is defined as an aggregation of different minerals. Mars has rocks and therefore minerals. No doubt the periodic table is well represented there. On earth there are mechanisms at work that, over long time periods, serve to concentrate many metals. And by concentrate I mean going from average terrestrial abundance to levels that are high enough to economically recover. Hydrothermal fluids, i.e., hot, pressurized water saturated with minerals, that eventually deposit and fill faults (vein formation) in the crust with concentrated deposits. Over time the veins are exposed at the surface and become accessible. This is a very important mechanism for the formation of viable ore deposits of many metals.
Even the very best ore deposits on earth require large amounts of electricity, diesel, and water to concentrate the ore to where smaller scale processes can isolate the metal. Ball milling, extraction, floatation and electrowinning of ore concentrates is needed for efficient recovery and is essential for recovering many metals. Other metals like the platinum group metals precipitate from within a cooling magma formation and settle into narrow layers of enriched rock.
My point is that mining is a tough job in earth with all the supplies you need. That won’t be true on Mars. Production of metal articles from Martian metals will be a tough nut to crack. Shipping of essentials to Mars will be needed for a very long time.