Quote from: Hotblack Desiato on 02/03/2016 09:41 PM..meat can be freeze-dried, but reconstituting it turns it into a slurry.....I spent a lot of summers of college and grad school working as a wilderness guide. I never had much problem with any kind of freeze dried meat: beef, chicken, ham, shrimp. And I ate a lot of it over the years.
..meat can be freeze-dried, but reconstituting it turns it into a slurry.....
ESA recently held a meeting to discuss possible human hibernation:http://motherboard.vice.com/read/a-brief-history-of-cryosleepObviously, that is still fairly speculative technology. But given the enormous practical burden of carrying large amounts of food/water and handling the resulting huge amount of human waste, it warrants serious consideration for MCT. Hibernation would also eliminate potential psychological issues, like boredom, in transit.
It is stating the obvious IMO that at some point the Mars colony has to account for the system-level reality of growing real food and fully recycling the waste... Ya know, an ecosystem.Assuming this much, I think it's useful to ask at what point in time do you start planning for the initial steps to happen? If you're going to have this discussion, it's also useful not to talk in absolutes, since it's likely even the first missions will at least have some experimental setup designed to produce something which can be consumed, and at the other end of the scale, even centuries from now, there will be some things which cannot be grown on Mars and are still imported from Earth.Between those two points, theres a t50... at time point at which half the food is grown at Mars, and half is imported.I think it's likely that if that t50 occurs during the operational lifetime of the MCT (say the next 3 decades), and it's probable that the MCT itself will incorporate a lot of that technology, in which case we can expect the design process would be in progress now.
There are other threads where agriculture on Mars would fit far better than here. Look in the general Mars section.
Sci-fi gets exactly three plausible means of interstellar and outer-system spaceflight for biological humans: Hibernation, new-physics FTL or new-physics CoE/CoM breaking engines, and generation ships.
Quote from: Robotbeat on 02/04/2016 02:07 PMThere are other threads where agriculture on Mars would fit far better than here. Look in the general Mars section.This is the active thread on those matters. Plenty of interesting posts. Please get the discussion there.http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=35877.0
Why would an MCT arrive in LEO (with around 200 tons, per Shotwell) packing 50 tons of propellant in place of 50 tons of gear?
What does BFR being too large for any existing pad have to do with it?
Quote from: Burninate on 02/03/2016 01:29 PMWhy would an MCT arrive in LEO (with around 200 tons, per Shotwell) packing 50 tons of propellant in place of 50 tons of gear? I was imagining something significantly more than 50 tons.QuoteWhat does BFR being too large for any existing pad have to do with it?Because if I run the rocket equation with 100 tons of payload, dV = 9500 m/s, Raptor's claimed Isp, and dry masses that I consider pretty conservative for SpaceX, I get a rocket that's not that big. Which suggests to me that the delta-V will be a lot higher - either it'll go to a much higher energy orbit or have quite a bit left.
No it can't. "Space" isn't cold. It's a vacuum. If you keep your food in an open airlock, it will have the same temperature as any other section of the ship's hull...
Astronauts are crew. Crew morale is important. Colonists are cargo. Only their survival rates matter.