The long flight will be One of the many risks that astronauts who travel to Mars in front. SIX TO NINE MONTHS Broken the safe radiation limit that NASA establishes as acceptable: 600 msv. The problem would be forgotten if you could get to Mars in just 90 days. And you can with current technology, according to recent research.
Conventional chemistry, record times. The physicist Jack Kingdon, a researcher at the University of California, has published in the magazine Scientific Reports A proposal that breaks with the provisions of trips to Mars. Normally, a flight to the red planet requires between six and nine months, which raises multitude of challenges for exposure to radiation. With Kingdon’s trajectory, 90 days per path would suffice.
The most surprising thing is that their calculations are based on the classic method to optimize interplanetary trajectories (Lambert’s problem) and do not depend on futuristic engines, but on a current chemical rocket: the Spacex starship.
Two crew and four loading ships. The proposal is a monumental scale. The mission to Mars would require six ships: two crew and four loads that would travel separately.
To put them on the route, they would take about 45 Starship pitches within two to three weeks, a rhythm that, although ambitious, fits with Spacex’s plans to massively climb their operations.
A gas station in space. The real logistics challenge would occur in the low terrestrial orbit. There, a starship-cistern fleet (ships dedicated exclusively to transport fuel) would perform a complex dancing of reposses:
- The two manned starship would need about 15 reposses each to load the 1,500 tons of propellant that will allow them to take the rapid trajectory.
- The four load starship, aimed at carrying the equipment and supplies, would receive only four reposses each and would be sent to Mars in a slower and lower energy consumption trajectory.
The shortcut. Once full of methane and liquid oxygen, the two crew ships would turn on their engines to escape the earth’s orbit. They would cover a high -energy Lambert type trajectory required by an ΔV ≈ 4.6 km/s, which translates into a 90 -day flight time. Just before being captured by the severity of Mars, the ships would make a key ignition to stop, reducing their input speed of about 9.7 km/sa about 6.8 km/s.
The Martian atmosphere would be in charge of dissipating the rest of the energy by aerocapture, a maneuver in which the ship “brushes” the atmosphere to stop without spending fuel. Finally, a brief ignition of the engines would allow a propulsive landing on the surface. The study demonstrates that this scheme is mathematically possible for the 2035 launch window, but it depends on Spacex dominating two critical technologies: the cryogenic orbital refueling on a large scale and hyperbolic aerocapture.
And the return? An even more complex plan. If the idea is to return, the mission becomes much bold. First, a fuel production plant should be established on Mars (As Sabatier reactors) to manufacture methane and oxygen from CO₂ and the ice of the planet.
The return plan implies that the manned ship take off from the surface of Mars and entered orbit. There, the load ships, which arrived previously, would also take off to act as cisterns in the Martian orbit, transferring all the necessary fuel to the manned ship for its 90 -day trip back to the earth.
Not everyone shares optimism. The study identifies a viable return window in 2037. However, not everyone shares optimism. The own Paper recognizes that his proposal collides with the vision of agencies such as NASA, which has historically shown preference for nuclear propulsion For fast missions to Mars, a technology that, according to the author of the study, still has a low maturity and great regulatory obstacles.
All this, of course, whenever the goal is to return. Recall that Elon Musk’s idea is to send robots first and then volunteers to build a self -sufficient city on the red planet.
Image | Spacex
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