So you want to live on Mars. In theory, it's a super cool
idea, an expansive, high tech city of the future, operating under the
protection of shining glass domes, life in luxury on the interplanetary frontier. In
practice, though, life on Mars will be rough going for a very long
while. Those metal buildings and glass domes are great for science fiction, but
we won't be seeing those things on Mars anytime this century. If you're serious
about occupying the Red planet, then the best bet is likely to be either
life underground three D printing some kind of rock based structure, or living in
a balloon. Today, we are going to advocate for the balloon as the
ideal Martian accommodation, or more specifically, a highly engineered, self sufficient inflatable
habitat. This is a technology that has been under development for three decades now,
and it's just about ready to begin playing a massive role in the future
of human space flight. Inflatable habitats solve a number of problems that are inherent
with trying to keep people alive and well outside of the Earth's atmosphere. They're
an excellent solution for future orbiting space stations, and they just might end up
being the key to Mars colonization. This is the space race. Three D
printing on Mars has been a long standing front runner in the design and engineering
of practical Mars colonies. We've seen a few great three D printing concepts arrive
over the past few years, some of them even endorsed and funded by NASA.
Those have been covered here on the Channel before, and we continue to
be big fans of three D printing in space. But the more time we
spend looking into these inflatable habitats, the more inherent flaws start to become visible.
With additive manufacturing on Mars, the basic concept behind three D printing in
space is that you would land a fully autonomous robotic system on an alien planet.
It would then deploy rovers to go out and scoop up mass of amounts
of regulith, which is the loose dust and bits of rock that cover the
surface. The collected material is then brought back to a high temperature oven that
mixes the regulath with a polymer substance and bakes it until it becomes a sort
of extrudable concrete. That concrete material is then laid down by a three D
printing machine that builds up the structure one thin layer at a time, So
that all sounds pretty neat, but obviously it's going to require us to land
all of those robots on Mars and then a ton of electricity to power these
things while they go about the process of collecting and melting and three D printing.
Then as an end result, we're left with what is essentially an above
ground cave made from Martian rock, which is very likely going to be physically
toxic to human beings. And that hits on another big issue here. We
don't actually have a sample of Martian regulath, so we don't fully know what's
in it, and we won't know for a few years at least, So
the theory that we can just to bake it into Plato to make a house
is more like an educated guest than a surebet. Whereas if we go the
inflatable route, we prefabricate the entire thing on Earth, loaded into a rocket
faring and ship into Mars. On arrival, the habitats self inflates, deploy
solar panels, powers up, and just waits for a human crew to arrive.
When we're talking about establishing the first human settlement on a planet two hundred
and ninety one million kilometers away. The most simple solution would most likely be
considered the best, and I think we're pretty clear on which one of those
ideas offers up the lowest complication. Now we can't talk about inflatable space habitats
without paying respects to the og Bigelow Aerospace. Before Musk, Bezos and Branson,
there was an eccentric billionaire named Robert Bigelow who decided that he wanted to
get into outer space. Bigelow amassed a fortune as the owner of the Budget
Suites of America Hotel, and in nineteen ninety eight he leveraged that wealth to
found his own aerospace company with the dream of creating hotels in space. We
could do a whole documentary just on Robert Bigelow. He is a character,
to say the least. Anyway, the company got straight to work on a
multi layer expandable space module technology that they were able to license directly from NASA.
The Transhab project was an idea concocted for the International Space Station in the
late nineteen nineties, but they were never able to secure the necessary funding from
members of US Congress. After a decade of private research and development, Bigelow
had a viable technology that was ready for a demonstration in outer space. In
twenty and twelve, NASA provided them eighteen million dollars in funding to develop the
Bigelow Expandable Activity Module or BEAM. By twenty sixteen, the module was birthed
to ISS and successfully inflated to four meters in length and three point two three
meters in diameter with a pressurized volume of sixteen cubic meters. Beam was more
like a proof of concept than a functional module of the ISS. It's still
up there inflated and pressurized, but from what I've heard, the astronauts mostly
just use it as a closet and they never leave the door open just in
case. But in the long term study of the beam's performance, it's proven
that it can withstand micro meteor impacts without taking damage, and levels of cosmic
radiation recorded inside the beam have been pretty much the same as they are anywhere
else on the ISS. So from that one limited test we can form a
pretty decent hypothesis that inflatable space station module's function at least as well as any
other space station module. Unfortunately, Bigelow Aerospace collapsed in March twenty twenty.
Robert freaked out, laid off the entire staff, and ceased all operations permanently.
Later that year, he went on to found a new institute that was
dedicated to researching life after death. Like I said, he's a really interesting
dude. So leave a comment if you'd watch a Robert Bigelow video. Luckily,
for the future of inflatable space habs, the Sierra Nevada Corporation came along
with their newly formed offshoot, CIRA Space. This is the same company that
has been making the Dream Chaser space plane, and they are partnered with Blue
Origin to build the future orbital Reef space station. The Large Integrated Flexible Environment
or LIFE Habitat is carrying on the same basic idea as the Transhab and the
Beam before it. The fully inflated LIFE will be three stories tall and twenty
seven feet in diameter, offering up about one third the internal volume of the
entires in one single module. In its compacted form, Life can be fitted
into a standard five meter rocket firing like the one on top of a Falcon
nine. Once deployed into orbit, Life self inflates and then uses its own
thruster system to maneuver to a final destination in orbit. Sierra is planning to
integrate Life modules into the upcoming orbital REEF station, but the modules are also
designed to be fully self sufficient standalone space stations in their own right, and
Sierra has envisioned Life as a modular system, so multiple habitats can be linked
together to form orbital structures with massive internal volumes. So you might be wondering
is it safe to live inside a space balloon? I mean, going to
outer space and especially visiting an alien planet are extremely dangerous activities just as a
baseline, but all things considered, it doesn't really get much safer than these
inflatable habitats. The outer shell may be soft, but it is made up
from multiple layers of an ultra tough kevlar like material called vectran, which is
a fiber spun from liquid crystal polymer, And if you look closely at the
Life prototype you can see the fabric is woven together kind of like a basket
to increase the material strength. Sierra says that when pressurized, their shell is
stronger than steel, and they've been verifying that with a series of small scale
tests over the past year. Obviously, that includes over pressure testing where they
just keep filling the vessel until it bursts. Those are actually pretty fun to
watch and they help Sierra to begin plotting data points about the consistency and longevity
of their product. They also perform ballistic testing with these smaller prototypes. Basically,
they take it out and shoot stuff at it to see what happens,
varying up the size of the projectile, the speed, and the angle of
attack. From the data they've gathered so far, Sierra is already projecting an
operational lifespan of about sixty years for the life habitat. But just for the
sake of being paranoid, what happens if something does puncture the shell, does
it burst like a balloon? Will you get sucked out into outer space?
The answer is no and no. So this is where we have to deprogram
our minds from what science fiction has taught us. Space is a vacuum in
the sense that it is an extremely low pressure environment, but it's not like
there's a giant dison out there just sucking up everything. The ambient pressure in
outer space is around negative fourteen psi. The air pressure on Earth at sea
level is around positive fourteen psi, so about thirty pounds of pressure differential per
square inch. It's not enough to cause an explosive decompression or suck anything out
through a hole. If a micro meteorite did puncture the inflatable hab it would
be like a pinhole in a bicycle tire. Air would leak out, but
just slowly and steadily it could be fixed. Is the point. What about
radiation? The good news here is that soft shells actually lend themselves very well
to highly effective radiation shielding. The best material for blocking radiation is actually hydrogen.
This is why you'll often hear people talk about using water as a radiation
shield. Polyethylene is a plastic polymer with a very high hydrogen content, and
it can be woven into a matrix that can be layered into the shell composition
of the inflatable module. If you've worn one of those surgical masks over the
past few years, those use a very similar woven polypropylene matrix to capture viruses
and stuff. Bigelow has also had some ideas in their old designs about high
hydrogen content foam materials that could be integrated into the soft shell to create a
very effective radiation shield. Again, leaving the Earth's magnetosphere is extremely dangerous no
matter what, but the inflatable habitat is at least as safe, or maybe
even safer than anything else we've got. Now that we know all that,
we can get back into how these inflatable habitats could function as a part of
a Mars colony. These modules are designed around a solid center core that contains
all of the primary systems, communications, life support, power, and all
of the hard goods like research equipment, the medical bay and exercise gear are
stored in here at launch. Then after the shell is inflated, the astronauts
arrive and move all of these things to the outer areas. There are two
distinct design applications here, zero gravity habs and planetary habs. Zero G is
what Sierra has been working on so far, and from an engineering perspective,
these are much easier to design. You can separate different areas of the hab
using just soft baffles. You don't need a solid floor or stairs or anything
rigid on the inside. But they do have plans for future life modules that
will function with gravity for a serious colony on Mars will probably want a combination
of ground based infrastructure and an orbital space station to function as a waypoint in
between Earth and Mars, same idea that NASA is working on with their lunar
Gateway station for the Moon. So the Life modules can handle both of those
applications. Sierra has an idea that if they link together enough modules, they
can form a ring shaped space station, which could then be rotated to create
an artificial gravity effect. And the current Life habitat design is only based on
existing rocket capabilities, but there are much bigger rockets coming soon that will offer
much larger cargo faring sizes. Bigger fairing means the opportunity for a bigger module.
In a March twenty twenty three interview with Fraser Kane at Universe Today,
the senior director of engineering at Sierra Space, Sean Buckley, revealed that his
company is already running the numbers on what they could accomplish with a SpaceX starship
sized cargo firing. The starship is promised to deliver a hundred metric tons of
mass directly to the surface of Mars in a fairing that is nine meters wide
at its base and around seventeen meters in length, but Elon Musk is already
talking about making the upper stage ship even longer, and SpaceX is developing even
more powerful Raptor three engines, so that could end up being even more capable
by the time where action flying these things to Mars. Sierra is estimating that
by taking full advantage of Starship they can create a jumbo sized life module that
would expand to over two thousand cubic meters in volume. The ISS is only
about nine hundred cubic meters, so with one single launch, Sierra could more
than double the working space. Fully inflated, the habitat could be as much
as sixty feet in length and forty two fifty meters in diameter, So with
one of those in orbit and one on the ground, we would essentially have
a fully functioning Martian infrastructure that would even be relatively safe and comfortable to support
a long term human presence. I think will be hard pressed to find an
idea that can really beat that.