Solar Power is Never Going to Work on Mars, and Everybody Knows It
Arthur C. Clarke predicted that in the future the unit of currency would be the megawatt-hour. Bitcoin is certainly pushing us in this direction on Earth, but this will be a hard reality on the surface of Mars. Whatever you want to do — breathe, drink, eat, explore — it will all be determined by how much power you produce.
There’s a history of using solar power on Mars — with the exception of Curiosity (which uses a radioisotope thermoelectric generator) all Mars rovers have relied on solar power for operations on Mars. But ultimately solar power will be unsuitable for anything much larger than a rover for a number of reasons.
Too Little Power
To understand this question, you have to start with a power budget and figure out the raw square meters of panels it would take to satisfy it. As I’ve explored before (here), generating fuel for return journeys is going to the overriding priority for early missions.
The only official source for propellant mass is the 2017 Becoming a Multiplanet Species presentation, which lists total propellant mass as 1100t (1,100,000 kg). While some of the flight specifics of the spaceframe have changed somewhat, the general characteristics of the Raptor engine have not, so it’s reasonable to expect that we’re probably…
