Plot Synopsis: A grandfather living on a small Mars colony will begin the story by telling his kids about how he was one of the first astronauts to begin colonizing Mars. In his story, he will talk about how they survived the journey over, how their rocket worked, the specific flight path, and other particulars related to their mission. The flight and landing will introduce conflict in the form of technical glitches or psychological issues. The denouement will end the story with a successful landing.
The central topic of my scifi story will be the epic struggle in making a yearlong travel from Earth to the inhospitable world of Mars. One of the main contentions in making the journey to Mars, completely ignoring the viability of living there, …show more content…
Unlike oxygen and water, food is possible to manufacture in situ on the way to mars or farther celestial bodies. Historically, it has not been general practice to grow food in space because there has never been a need to. The Apollo missions were brief enough that they could afford to take aboard all the food they would need. The constraints for the food supplies were calculate to be 1.7 lb/ man / day for a 14 day mission with 3 crew members resulting in about a 70 lb payload, approximately the weight of another half crew member [3]. This problem becomes larger with an increase in crew members and mission duration. It is estimated that a space flight to Mars would take about one year’s time resulting in a ~1850 lb payload (3700 both ways) for 3 or 3700 lb (7400 both ways) for six crew members. According to one article, the time estimates are even larger at 2.5 to 3 years with an estimated food weight of 12 tons (not counting packaging) [1]. For serious deep space exploration, either rocket technology will have to increase dramatically, or a different approach must be taken. A possible solution to this problem is to send the food in advance to the destination but for a location like Mars, the food would be five years old by the time they reached the surface and all the vitamins and nutrients would have broken down[1]. A different solution which corrects this problem is to have …show more content…
The strides we are making in producing and applying technologies like water and air recycling and sustainable food sources will hopefully coalesce into a successful manned venture to Mars and
The central topic of my scifi story will be the epic struggle in making a yearlong travel from Earth to the inhospitable world of Mars. One of the main contentions in making the journey to Mars, completely ignoring the viability of living there, …show more content…
Unlike oxygen and water, food is possible to manufacture in situ on the way to mars or farther celestial bodies. Historically, it has not been general practice to grow food in space because there has never been a need to. The Apollo missions were brief enough that they could afford to take aboard all the food they would need. The constraints for the food supplies were calculate to be 1.7 lb/ man / day for a 14 day mission with 3 crew members resulting in about a 70 lb payload, approximately the weight of another half crew member [3]. This problem becomes larger with an increase in crew members and mission duration. It is estimated that a space flight to Mars would take about one year’s time resulting in a ~1850 lb payload (3700 both ways) for 3 or 3700 lb (7400 both ways) for six crew members. According to one article, the time estimates are even larger at 2.5 to 3 years with an estimated food weight of 12 tons (not counting packaging) [1]. For serious deep space exploration, either rocket technology will have to increase dramatically, or a different approach must be taken. A possible solution to this problem is to send the food in advance to the destination but for a location like Mars, the food would be five years old by the time they reached the surface and all the vitamins and nutrients would have broken down[1]. A different solution which corrects this problem is to have …show more content…
The strides we are making in producing and applying technologies like water and air recycling and sustainable food sources will hopefully coalesce into a successful manned venture to Mars and