Terra Nova

[unsunghero]

In the late 1970s Mars is discovered to have an earth like atmosphere, that there is water, that there is limited plant and animal life - nothing sentient, though. The world is polarized between two armed camps - nationalist Germany/Russia/Italy/Japan, and Britain(+ all of the dominions)/France/US.
Both space agencies have space shuttles/space stations. What happens next?

[Thande]

Is this a 'no WW2' scenario?

[unsunghero]

Could be an otl WWII stalemate/draw circa 1944/1945; or it could be atl defeated - Entente- takes- on -Central- Powers timeline, and loses. Either way, the politics are superfluous. What matters is what the various powers do when they realize there is real estate of far greater value than a few bits of Africa or Asia.

[Thande]

This reminds me of a timeline I'm working on in which the Big Three (the British Imperial Commonwealth of Nations or Britcom, the German Fourth Reich, and the Rio Pact) are working to colonise Mars in the late 60s/early 70s. Mars is just as inhospitable there as in OTL, but the drive to colonise is still there.

[unsunghero]

Germany + allies finance and build a ship to travel to Mars and establish a research base/supply depot which arrives March 26 1995. The Americans + allies are behind, only designing their own long range ship, as well as trying to steal German plans. Germany +allies claim Mars exclusively :eek:

[Thande]

Orion pulse-thrust ships please please please? :o

[Tetsu]

Aw, no Soviet Union to make Mars a real Red planet? :D

[unsunghero]

Orion pulse-thrust ships please please please? :o

Hmm...sounds interesting. But wasn't this the idea of using nuclear power to break orbit, or something? I was led to believe this was shelved as a 'bad idea' because of nuclear contamination. However, I don't really know anything about it - care to shed a little light. And besides, as I stipulated, the Germans +allies and US+allies have space stations and shuttles, etc. Maybe they can build and use them purely in space?

[DMA]

Yeah, there's nothing to stop you using Saturn type rockets to send the various parts of a Orion type vessel into space & assemble the ship in Earth orbit. From there they merely blast away to their destination.

There are problems, though, with the actual Orion engine system; that is you basically have a nuke going off under your ass. Needless to say, the shock will be massive, so construction will be plauged with difficulties. I believe the last time it was seriously looked at, it was planned to have small nukes, in the 1ktn yield, as well as magnetic fields to dampen the impact of the explosion & the radiation. Considering the high tech level required, even today, we couldn't do the magnetic field part.

Then there's the problem of oxygen production. You can't make oxygen out of nothing. This, thus, limits any long distance space travel to the overall amount of oxygen you can carry with the ship. Solve that problem & the rest, more or less, will fall into place.

[unsunghero]

Hmm. Well, would a hydroponics - bay type arrangment work out? If I'm not mistaken, one of NASA's projects was to see if they could grow plants in outer space. I have no idea how that worked out, but obviously you need gravity first, otherwise the dirt, seeds, water, etc. just floats away. NASA and the other space agencies have the idea of a rotating mid section towards that end. Obviously, there are numerous problems - however, I think a readily inhabitable Mars, plus a pretty good space program already in place by the '70s would rectify these difficulties by the 90s

[DMA]

Hmm. Well, would a hydroponics - bay type arrangment work out? If I'm not mistaken, one of NASA's projects was to see if they could grow plants in outer space. I have no idea how that worked out, but obviously you need gravity first, otherwise the dirt, seeds, water, etc. just floats away. NASA and the other space agencies have the idea of a rotating mid section towards that end. Obviously, there are numerous problems - however, I think a readily inhabitable Mars, plus a pretty good space program already in place by the '70s would rectify these difficulties by the 90s


Well you've pointed out a couple of problems already with the hydroponics system. Plus you'd need a huge area to support just a handful of people. In fact the hydroponics part of any given ship could be as much as half the overall size. Plus there's a little thing called water. Not only do the plants need it but so too the humans. And we'd be talking in the megalitres I would think. It depends how big you want to build the ship in question I guess, plus the fact that it'll need technology as in hydroponics, a gravity system of some sought, not forgetting the complex Orion system, & the hassles with constructing something in space. So living on a habital Mars isn't really the problem, it's getting there for the first time that is.

[Dave Howery]

no sentient life? Crap... if there aren't four armed green men and red skinned egg laying humans, why bother going there? :)

[Thande]

I thought the tests Dyson and his crew did showed that there was no need for any additional structural reinforcement, magnetic fields etc. (yes, this surprised me as well) as each nuke would only take a tenth of a millimetre off the pusher-plate.

For those who don't know about Orion: it was a design for a relatively huge, vaguely bullet-shaped spacecraft that was fitted with an enormous steel 'pusher-plate' at the back, fitted via shock absorbers to the main vehicle. You threw nuclear bombs out of the back, they exploded, the shockwave thrust the pusher-plate forward, and the shock absorbers moderated it so it seemed like continuous acceleration.

[DMA]

I thought the tests Dyson and his crew did showed that there was no need for any additional structural reinforcement, magnetic fields etc. (yes, this surprised me as well) as each nuke would only take a tenth of a millimetre off the pusher-plate.

For those who don't know about Orion: it was a design for a relatively huge, vaguely bullet-shaped spacecraft that was fitted with an enormous steel 'pusher-plate' at the back, fitted via shock absorbers to the main vehicle. You threw nuclear bombs out of the back, they exploded, the shockwave thrust the pusher-plate forward, and the shock absorbers moderated it so it seemed like continuous acceleration.


The latest I was reading over at FAS, was the Russians concluded that without the magnetic fields, not only were the continuous shock waves probably too much for the ship, but radiation was also a problem which continuously threatened the crew. Then there was the fear that the "pusher-plate" may suffer damage meaning the next nuclear detonation would destroy the ship.

Anyway, Orion is really overrated considering you need nuclear explosions in order to get the ship going. The space nuclear engine (KIWI/NERVA et al) was by far the better option & was in the development & prototype stage when the plug was pulled. See this index at FAS (http://www.fas.org/nuke/space/index.html) for a history of nuclear space propulsion.

[Thande]

Aren't NASA currently working on a nuclear engine for Project Prometheus?

[Hendryk]

If you're going for exotic spacecraft, how about huge solar-wind sailships? I can picture those moored at the end of an equatorial geostationary elevator--the whole concept would be quite energy-friendly.
But the Earth politics you're starting with are a bit puzzling. Getting there would be an ATL in its own right; plus, what about Latin America, India and China?

[Thande]

Solar sailers are great for getting from Earth to an outer planet; rather less good for getting back again. :D

[Hendryk]

Solar sailers are great for getting from Earth to an outer planet; rather less good for getting back again. :D
Well, I wonder--can you sail against the solar wind?

[zoomar]

Although this is a little different from the supposition in the original post, if Mars had an earthlike climate, this would probably have been essentially confirmed from earth-based telescopic observations since at least the late 18th or early 19th century.

The entire development of aerospace technology would have been radically altered and space travel would have been a major priority, I see julesvernsian steampunk spaceships by the early 20th century and the first explorations of the planet prior to the 1950's.

[Thande]

Actually, in the 19th century many people thought Mars DID harbour life (macroscopic life, canal-builders and what-have-you) - in fact, there was a great prize offered (think the X-Prize) for the first person to make contract with alien life, and the contract specifically excluded Martian life as that would be 'too easy'!

Also there were plans to build a giant perfectly circular or triangular trench in the Sahara desert, fill it with oil and ignite it so the Martians (with their telescopes) could see this perfectly geometric shape and thus surmise that there was life on Earth.

[Justin Green]

Another thing about rion was that when you started chucking nukes out of the back you needed to be a fair distance already from earth, otherwise the electro-magnetic pulse fries satelites in orbit.

[DMA]

Aren't NASA currently working on a nuclear engine for Project Prometheus?


As far I'm aware it's more or less a study rather than an actual R&D project leading to an actual nuclear engine powering a probe. Needless to say, they've got plenty to study as NERVA & KIWI were around doing their thing in the 1950s & 60s. If the plug had not been pulled, I'd dare say Project Prometheus & many others would be flying missions all over the solar system by now.

[Acrosome]

I have to agree that NERVA is a much more promising technology than Orion. IIRC NERVA was a solid-phase nuclear engine, and even more efficient liquid- and even gas-state nuclear engines have been designed. They just can never be flown (because of the Outer Space Treaty) or even tested (because of draconian eco-freaks) in OTL.

That said, I thought a proof-of-concept Orion craft actually flew, though it was a scale model propelled by gunpowder bombs, and only limped around over some desert somewhere for a few seconds...

[Thande]

That's true about the scale-model Orion powered by gunpowder bombs, I've seen the footage. Looked like a giant Party Popper. :p