File another engineering project under super-ambitious and suspicious. In this case the project belongs to the Lake Matthew Team, and their proposal to terraform a swathe of Mars to make it both inhabitable and self-sustaining.
As we steadily come closer to Elon Musk’s goal of being an interplanetary species, there is a lot of conjecture about how the first human settlement on the red planet will come to be. It’s becoming more and more likely that private enterprise will be the ones responsible for bring humanity there.
For the Lake Matthew Team, one of the major challenges of establishing a Martian outpost will be the massive amounts of supplies that need to be put in orbit and delivered safely 140 million miles away. According to their plan, not only would their settlement be able to provide food and water for thousands of Martian settlers, but it would also be able to provide enough natural resources for some to be shipped back to Earth.
But first, it starts with an extra-ambiguous promise to deliver a devastating impact to the surface of Mars. Such an impact will leave a 9 km wide crater with its bedrock harboring 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 (one quintillion—I just like the figure) Joules of residual impact heat energy. LMT has said that the impact won’t be nuclear, but will instead use a ‘Shepard’ spacecraft to deflect a current space body towards Mars. The crater wouldn’t be a viable settlement location for several years while the dust and debris settle around the crater.
The abundant ice on Mars would fill the impact crater with water, yet water on Mars at an Earthly room temperature would boil off quickly. The crater, more than 1 km deep, would also have a higher atmospheric pressure than the open plains of Mars. According to LMT, a heat exchanger could maintain the liquid water in the crater at about 11° C year round. This water would be used by settlers and the greenhouses, as well as by the dome structure, which is made of ETFE fabric or film, as well as scavenged materials from delivery vessels. Wastewater would run throughout conduit in the structure to provide stability and radiation shielding.
Electricity for Lake Matthew would be provided by solar power in the Martian summer and by hydroelectricity in the winter. Per the official website, “in summer ice-rich upland terrain can be sealed and overheated to force high-volume melt. Meltwater accelerates down a channel cut into the crater wall, delivering tens of TeraJoules of kinetic energy at lakeside. That energy is stored via pump-turbine in elevated hydroelectric brine reservoirs for release in winter.”
Also of note, is the estimate that Mars’s Southern Highlands may harbor trillions of dollars of rare metals, that can be processed by companies that have leased space at Lake Matthew or shipped back to Earth. Either way, Lake Matthew is at least partially self-funding.
Of course, this is an elementary review of plans to get humans living and thriving on Mars, although they are the first proposals brought forth by a private organization. LMT hopes that a consortium of private companies can band together to create a consortium to profit from the resources on Mars thanks to the 2015 U.S. SPACE Act, although who knows if Lake Matthews ever materializes beyond talk.
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