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Tempcolonizing Mars

Better Essays

Viet Mai
ESS 102 AL
Writing Project
Day 0: Background and Mission Start It is February here on Earth. The year is 2071. Humans have long abandoned the idea of completely colonizing Mars. Instead, they have decided to build outposts in space much like the European explorers in the 16th century, on route to China for trade to protect the motherland’s trade route from enemies and refuel ships. About 10 years ago, scientists began building an outpost on Mars a few miles from Gale Crater. Robots are maintaining the facility, but their hands are not quite suited for wiring the base. Thus, NASA deemed it necessary to send humans to Mars to get the base running for future missions on an improved version of NASA’s Orion spacecraft. The Orion spacecraft …show more content…

Our capsule is much larger than previous ones due to the necessities needed to support life. The complex had three floors partitioned into several sections. At the center of each was a circular room with a ladder. Arranged along the north side are inter-capsule communication monitors. On the top floor, the central room also provides our communications panel used to contact Earth. On the top floor, the outer ring is divided into an exercise room to the north and a dining room to the south. The middle floor’s outer ring is divided into a lab to the south, the men’s living quarters to the northwest, the women’s living quarter’s to the northeast. The lowest floor’s outer ring contains the greenhouse. The spacecraft uses nuclear thermal propulsion, which relies on heating a hydrogen fluid to temperatures nearing 5000 degrees Fahrenheit and raising pressures to about 1000 lbs/in2 to imitate the nuclear fusion process of the sun [7]. The resulting heated hydrogen will then be released through a nozzle to provide thrust for the spacecraft to move [7]. It has a specific impulse of about 900 seconds, which is twice the specific impulse of the most efficient chemical rockets [7, …show more content…

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