Just as much information, but shortened. Also mostly Space News.
Can humans REALLY colonize Mars?
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Yes, humans can colonize Mars, but there are some issues that we would need to get around. Let's say you launch a rocket into earth-orbit, then from there, fired your engines to put yourself on a trajectory to rendezvous with Mars sometime within the next few months. Sure, you can arrive at Mars, and land, as long as you have a heat shield to survive atmospheric entry and engines that you can start up to touch down safely, but you need a way to get back to Earth, and you also need a way to communicate with Earth.
Mars orbits farther away from the Sun than Earth does, so the 2 planets' orbits are not in sync. Mars orbits slower than Earth, so at one point, Mars and Earth will be exactly horizontal from each other, like this image below.
The sun is now in between Earth and Mars, so you don't really have a way to communicate, as our huge star, The Sun, is right in the way for our antennas on Mars to communicate with ground stations or satellites on or around Earth. This means, if there is a leak in your station on Mars, well, you can't tell anyone about it besides your Martian friends. You can fix this with a deep-space/interplanetary satellite network, consisting of thousands of satellites orbiting the sun, all at different orbits to have communication with Earth no matter where you are in the solar system. You send data to one satellite, then it goes to the next one, all the way around the sun until when the last satellite receives the data, it sends it directly to Earth, then, the people on Earth receive the data. There is also a problem with this, #1 it will take some time to get the data all the way to Earth, unless we invent some new method of transferring this data, and #2, it is pretty unreliable, if one satellite misreads data, you will be pointlessly sending faulty data across thousands of satellites just to get the useless data to Earth, without you even knowing anything went wrong.
Ok, that is the first problem, the second problem is, when you land on Mars, you used up your fuel to get in Earth Orbit, put yourself on a trajectory to intercept Mars, and then to land on Mars. You have no fuel left now, and you are basically stuck on Mars. Yeah, that sucks. There is a solution to this, you can use Mars' atmosphere and surface to get Liquid Oxygen and Liquid Methane, a perfect rocket fuel mixture, but you cant steal all of Mars' resources forever, you need a more reliable source, at least until you steal everything from Mars.
We, humans, have experience with sending stuff to mars, we have sent multiple rovers, including the perseverance Mars Rover that was launched just recently launched last year (it is currently 2021), and as of January 31st, 2021, the perseverance rover will be touching down on Mars in under a month. We could do the same thing, except instead of a rover being on top of the rocket as the payload, it can be a human-rated space vessel. SpaceX is working on its Starship Rocket a lot, which its goal is to land humans on Mars. They plan on making Liquid Methane and Liquid Oxygen from Mars to use as rocket fuel to return to Earth, but it is unclear how they will communicate with the people on Mars when The Sun is directly in between Mars and Earth. So far, it looks like they are progressing fast, setting us on a track to reach Mars sometime in 2023-2026. Maybe they will use their fast progressing laser-powered Starlink Satellites to communicate with Earth. With the current rate SpaceX is progressing, you will be able to go to Mars in your lifetime, not just once, but multiple times to Mars and back to Earth.
We all know how rocket science is relatively complicated. Actually, not entirely. Hypergolic fuels are pretty simple. A Hypergolic fuel mixture is usually used in rockets, and consists of 2 main materials, a fuel and an oxidizer. The fuel is usually a form of Hydrazine, and the oxidizer is usually Dinitrogen Tetroxide. The Hydrazine and Dinitrogen Tetroxide ignite spontaneously upon contact, which is why it is considered Hypergolic. Hypergolic fuels are indeed less complicated than what can be called "usual" rocket fuel, like a mixture of RP-1 (rocket grade kerosene), and LOX (liquid oxygen). The LOX helps ignite your fuel, which in this case is RP-1/Kerosene. You also need an outside ignition source to ignite the LOX + Kerosene mixture, as they do not instantly combust. With Hypergolic fuels, you don't need an outside ignition source, at all. They ignite themselves, an outside ignition source like ignition fluid or spark plugs would be quite useless. SpaceX's Crew Dr
Guion Bluford was the first black American astronaut. He was also a fighter pilot and engineer, like lots of other astronauts. He had spent 28 days, 16 hours, and 33 minutes in space. He flew on 4 space shuttle missions, STS-8, STS-39, STS-61-A, and STS-53, which are all Space Shuttle Challenger, and Space Shuttle Discovery. Guion Bluford had received a degree in Aerospace Engineering. When Bluford was selected to become a NASA Astronaut to go to space in the year 1978, he had shortly after, begin training, which lasted about 1 year. In August 1979, Bluford was officially an astronaut. Bluford later retired. He had received countless awards for many different things. Bluford's last mission was STS-53, which launched from Kennedy Space Center on December 2, 1992. The crew of five deployed the classified Department of Defense payload DOD-1 and then performed several Military-Man-in-Space and NASA experiments. After completing 115 orbits of the Earth in 175 hours, Discovery landed at
There are many different types of rocket engines, usually referred to as rocket engine cycles. We will be discussing 3 main cycles in this blog post. Open Cycle/Gas Generator, Closed Cycle/Staged Combustion Cycle, Expander cycle, and pressure-fed cycle. Open Cycle/Gas Generator Cycle: The open cycle class rocket engines are engines that take a tiny bit of fuel and a tiny bit of oxidizer, and turn it into a gas by burning it, to spin the turbopumps. That small amount of fuel and oxidizer is being burned in the gas generator chamber. The turbopumps are the super fast spinning pumps that convert low pressure fuel to high pressure, shooting them into the combustion chamber. The exhaust from gas generator chamber is then dumped overboard from a pipe. This leads to a waste of efficiency and slightly less thrust. Closed Cycle/Staged Combustion Cycle: The closed cycle class rocket engines are nearly the same as open cycle, except instead of dumping the gas generator exhaust overboard on anot
