Bringing people home from Mars
I have been thinking about this problem for a couple years now. There have been ideas like we could use Mars resources to fuel the launcher to maybe they could just stay on Mars. Neither of those ideas will we wise for our first trip to Mars unless we delay it a long time so we could develop the necessary technology.
I want to go sooner so I have been wondering what could work sooner.
Enter the Personal Mars Escape Booster and Spacecraft (PMEBS). Why Personal? What could be more personal than wanting to come home, just kidding. This goes to one of my space travel design philosophy and that is smaller packages, modularity and redundancy. Lower the cost of failure for each event and increase the odds for mission success. If we send 12 sets of PMEBS to Mars for each 10 people then if 2 of them don’t work or were damaged then everyone still gets to come home. This also ups the quantity of space craft produced which lowers the unit cost. It also provides operational flexibility, not everyone would have to leave the planet at the same time. Finally it makes the vehicles smaller so it will be easier to get them down to the planet’s surface. They could be bundled for the ride from Earth to Mars and we would want them on the surface and checked out before you send people to Mars or at least before you send them down to the surface. There are a couple stories on Medium about Mars 2030. There is so much to do and not enough people who even understand the challenges to make 2030 real, it is not happening even with unlimited budgets and that ain’t happening either. I would be elated if we get back to the Moon by 2030.
TEK
