Tito's Mars mission to use HUMAN WASTE as radiation shield The team behind a planned private manned mission to Mars say they've come up with a way to protect voyagers from radiation exposure during the long trip: pack the walls of the spacecraft with a layer of the astronauts' own waste. "It's a little queasy sounding, but there's no place for that material to go, and it makes great …
Some few molecules of the 36,500 gallons of water you consume each year has been in the urine of a mongol lord, a prostitute's abortion, and even Hitler's shit. Every glass of water contains molecules of H2O that were once in the bladder of a leper. The sort of folk who travel in space are both more aware of this issue than most and less concerned about it.
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There's no chance of a martian superbug (though it's plausible that some earth-sourced extremophile might be at home there). A one-way manned landing is still a good idea, though. The astronauts would spend the rest of their (probably short) lives there, but they could get a lot of science done. Far more than any robotic probe we can make right now, and it's a good first step towards a sustainable colony too. The only problem is that the public would be appalled at the idea, for some strange moral reason. Eventually China will do it.
"Do not bring back some random virus or bacteria that our probes cannot detect. We are happy to send care packages!"
Congratulations on being the most stupid thing I've read today.
How will these bacteria (so far undiscovered by us on several missions there) fly several thousand miles into space, penetrate the vessel's hull and adapt to a totally alien host, who might have totally differing biology.
In your own time...
If the food and water is to be used as a radiation shield, then surely, consuming them would negate the whole purpose as 1 year old water and food would contain a years worth of accumulated radiation?
Unless of course, the radiations half-life is relatively short. More data required...........
It's been done.
IIRC the Skylab 'naught dried their feces by vacuum exposure for packing in the LOX tank of the re-purposed launch vehicle they were living in.
People have done some work on urine but it seems feces are the #1 unsolved problem in closed cycled life support.
Potentially they offer a rich range of starting options for combining with all that CO2 you have left over. Note in space ultra high vacuum is cheap. We're talking pressures in micro Torr (millionths of a millimetre of Hg). Evacuate a chamber, connect your tank of chopped up feces to it and the water should come off readily. A little gentle centrifuging will get the water to collect.
The aerogel would be in addition to all the original mass for the food. The goal of storing cr@p is to refill the gaps left by taking the food out.
On a side point, can anyone explain to me how aerogels manage to work as radiation shielding? I just can't get my head round how an ultra-low density solid could possibly stop anything.... But then again, I'm just a Computer Science grad....
Anyone have a citation for aerogels insulating against ionizing radiation? The sources I consulted all mention the insulating properties of various aerogels for thermal radiation, which is a rather different problem. (And they mention the use of aerogels in Cherenkov radiators, which is also irrelevant to this application, as far as I can see, though you'd have a nice indication of how much ionizing radiation was hitting your shielding.)
Incidentally - the article mentioned something about NASA working on extracting drinking water from urine. That's old hat, surely, and I've read more than one article on NASA tech for extracting water from solid wastes, so that's not new either. (And indeed it's rather obvious.)
" A whole new meaning.....
brings a whole new meaning to......
Klingons on the starboard bow........
(Can't believe no-one got there before me)"
I was expecting a raft of replies along the lines of "Surely you mean the #2 problem in closed cycle life support."
People just don't appreciate good comic opportunities.
<sigh>
That's a LOT of poo. If we say one movement each per day we're looking at 1 kiloturd.
Maybe that - kiloturd - should be the new unit of space travel, combining time spent and number of people travelling?
Either way it's a good idea but you have to worry the landing back on Earth is going to be more risky with all those bags liable to burst.
I admit these ideas are likely not new, but here we go:
Feeding: pre-deploy stores and supply modules with, say, an SPS (Spatial Positioning System) so the modules are on their predicted flight plan. Design them with "spacedar" so that when the ship is about a million miles away, mutual intercept, mating, and transfer occurs. The emptied module can be designed to be a rescue shelter in the event something goes wrong on the way. Then, rescue and recovery would be much shorter than going ALL the way to Mars.
Disposal: Can not a special autoclave be designed with an input/output to direct the waste to the fuel exhaust? Of course, if that is designed in, it negates the opportunity to capitalize on using waste as a shield on the way over. But, it could be used to burn up the solids on the way back. Also, burning a little or dumping a little here and there might make for an interesting "cookie/bread crumbs trail" in the event comms are lost and someone thinks it's possible to pick up the scent of their nascent iron (not ion) trail....
Shielding: Similar to Feeding. Can not a hull liner be parked in orbit a year before the launch? It could be designed to be mated witth the space ship, like a docking collar, except the ship "en-sheathes" (well, you know, like... Putting on a, well, you know...) itself. Of course, a lot of momentum would be lost if the ship launch was more from orbit rather than from Terrra Firma.
If enough inertia can be otained from pre-Earth departure, then the vessel could make up for the time lost ensheathing the hull. The liner would only need to shiled the hab sections, meaning the ship could be designed with engines that attach after the hab hull is parked awaiting the engines and sensors body parts.
I'm not any engineer, but I would think that if the hull is going up in modules, then shields could be modules, too, just wrapped around or slipped on around the hull. They could contain the insulation or shielding that may be more efficient to sent up to pre-assembly orbit. Room could be left to capture waste for recycling, and the shield itself could be jettisoned on Mars approach, or after some period of time after fly-by. During that possible 7 or 8 months on the return, another speed-matching supply module could be pre-positioned.
Ultimately, the size and weighth of the vessel could be reduced and lightened -- well, assuming non-compressable labs will be inside the modules.
For fun/recreation, in the event some electronics are damaged by space radiation, they people should have some games to play: cards, dice, Toss Across, Connect Four, Battleship, Etch-a-Sketch, Slinky, knitting, and other things that can be fun to play in low or zero gravity.
Married Couple: Why married? Compatible unmarried couples of either genger could go up. In any case, if safe sex is expected, then other "consummables" will have to be packed, unpacked, used, then discarded -- discarded to SOMEwhere. If the need for a married couple is very important, it must be that there is an agenda to intentionally time and cause during-deep-space-impregnation of the present female. Is the Vatican funding part of this mission? If no woman goes, I guess it would be Mrs/Miss-Shun-to-Mars. Or, is it that policy makers do not want to have students learn about deep space "ass-sto-naught-tics" of some sort, which either gender could engage in.
Anyway, if there is a real 2018 launch, the ship needs to be designed by 2014, I'd guess, and construction finished by 2017, which might leave 12-to-2 months of pre-departure bug hunting and systems checks. 5 years is a VERY litttle amount of time.
Use um, "used" condoms to store solid waste, then attach to outside of craft and allow to freeze.
Simplez!
Probably a stupid question, but wouldn't water added to said waste be a good idea to increase its cross sectional area?
maybe add boric acid to water as well to make it more effective as a moderator.
While water would certainly be helpful in shielding, it may be more helpful inside the astronauts. This is a mass-constrained design: Getting anything out of the earth's well costs a lot of money. That's the appeal of using feces as shielding: It's already available during the mission, unavoidably, so by putting it to some practical use you can reduce the amount of shielding you need to launch. Same for the idea of using a final booster stage for directional shielding: It's effectively free mass, once it's done it's main job.
Tito said that he would like his astronauts to be a couple, preferably married, to help offset some of the psychological difficulties.
I'm sorry, but if your aim is to select a pair that are happy to spend 17 months shagging their way to Mars and back in a huge ball of shit, psychological difficulties come with the territory.
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