Attempting to establish a colony on Mars is a costly and research intensive endeavour. It will take a very special group of people to travel to Mars and spend their whole lives there. These volunteers will need to be very well trained. It will also take a lot of resources to sustain this colony, especially in its early days. If the target of 2025, which is only eleven years away, is to be met, a very large expenditure will need to be made on research due to our very limited understanding of how our bodies react to zero gravity and a far lower atmospheric pressure. The feasibility of this venture is very questionable. Even with the training they get, the volunteers will be faced with a whole range of medical problems caused by living in conditions
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Although this can be reduced selecting volunteers as healthy as possible, it is still a large amount of very expensive equipment. For example an MRI scanner usually costs around one million pounds. This equipment, as mentioned earlier, must be very advanced and a lot of research will be required to develop it. It will also cost millions of pounds to transport this equipment to the colony in Mars and to transport consumables such as food to Mars. Bottled oxygen will be required to sustain the astronauts and as a result will be used up very quickly. Water on Mars can be electrolysed to make oxygen using several redundant systems like on the international space station, but a backup for these systems in the event of failure or malfunction will be required. In the long term, terraforming is a solution. Changing the atmospheric composition on Mars will make it more habitable and eventually eliminate the need for bottled oxygen but this extremely research intensive activity could take thousands of years to achieve its desired end …show more content…
We already know what an extended time in zero gravity conditions does to the body. Muscle mass is reduced and people have difficulty walking when they return to earth. This is obviously a very basic understanding and we don’t even know what effect would lifelong exposure to zero or low gravity have on the human body. A possible way of doing this would be to send a different group of volunteers into orbit for an extended period of time such as ten years and monitor the effects of long term zero gravity. This would be a costly venture but feasible as it is relatively simple to resupply the group and return them to earth at the end of the mission. The long term effect of living in low atmospheric pressure will also be investigated in this mission. Although the astronauts will be wearing space suits, the atmospheric pressure on Mars is approximately 0.6 percent of that on earth which makes it not ideal for
Although this can be reduced selecting volunteers as healthy as possible, it is still a large amount of very expensive equipment. For example an MRI scanner usually costs around one million pounds. This equipment, as mentioned earlier, must be very advanced and a lot of research will be required to develop it. It will also cost millions of pounds to transport this equipment to the colony in Mars and to transport consumables such as food to Mars. Bottled oxygen will be required to sustain the astronauts and as a result will be used up very quickly. Water on Mars can be electrolysed to make oxygen using several redundant systems like on the international space station, but a backup for these systems in the event of failure or malfunction will be required. In the long term, terraforming is a solution. Changing the atmospheric composition on Mars will make it more habitable and eventually eliminate the need for bottled oxygen but this extremely research intensive activity could take thousands of years to achieve its desired end …show more content…
We already know what an extended time in zero gravity conditions does to the body. Muscle mass is reduced and people have difficulty walking when they return to earth. This is obviously a very basic understanding and we don’t even know what effect would lifelong exposure to zero or low gravity have on the human body. A possible way of doing this would be to send a different group of volunteers into orbit for an extended period of time such as ten years and monitor the effects of long term zero gravity. This would be a costly venture but feasible as it is relatively simple to resupply the group and return them to earth at the end of the mission. The long term effect of living in low atmospheric pressure will also be investigated in this mission. Although the astronauts will be wearing space suits, the atmospheric pressure on Mars is approximately 0.6 percent of that on earth which makes it not ideal for