Soviet colony on the Red Planet: Mars

[Nell_Lucifer]

Alright. So I had this thought for a couple days, what if the Soviet Union established a colony on Mars?

The POD I think for this TL would be Korolev's survival and, instead of trying to beat the USA to the Moon, the Politburo is convinced (somehow) that landing on the Moon before the Americans is unfeasible and a waste of resources. Instead, they are convinced that Mars is a much, better choice. Plus, it would give them a symbolic and technological victory by landing on the Red Planet. (Basically, the Soviet Union is placing all their resources of their space program for Mars)

I am thinking about a small colony of settlers, say, 300 people? With the first humans to land in the early 80s, setting up habitats and building shelters, buildings, small farms, etc.
Now. While I imagine the world reaction would be extreme to the Reds landing on the Red Planet, I am more interested in a failed colony type of scenario and the world's reaction to that. Basically, there are two options that I have in mind: (That I consider as being the primary and main ones)

Option 1: After the Fall of the Soviet Union, the colony slowly dies because of lack of supplies and food being constantly sent by the motherland, leading to starving, infighting, revolt and so on.
a) Until the colony reaches a somewhat "sustainable" population in the dozens, with small improvised farms producing just enough food for everyone.
b) The colony doesn't improve and end up dead after a few years. The last reminder being the abandoned buildings and recordings left by the settlers for other explorers to find.

Option 2: After the Fall of the Soviet Union, the colony reaches self-sustainability, if only barely, being completely cut off by the motherland. It is not a thriving colony, they are left in a harsh environment that would kill them easily, with not enough resources, supplies, well, not enough of everything, but they are surviving and slowly, extremely so, moving forward.

So what are your thoughts about this scenario? How would the world react to the abandoned, last remnant of the Soviet Union slowly dying (Option 1) or barely surviving (Option 2) in the immediate future and long term future?
(The US doesn't have the capabilities - or the interest - to bring them all back to Earth even if they wanted to)

 

[The Tai-Pan]

Wouldn't we bring the Soviet residents home in Option 1?

 

[Nell_Lucifer]

Wouldn't we bring the Soviet residents home in Option 1?

They don't have that option. While they did have the capabilities at first to return to orbit, after a few years without problems and a constant supply of resources from the motherland, they kinda, got rid of the landing crafts for spare parts. After all, in their mind, the Soviet Union was doing well and there was no reason to believe the supplies will end.
Or, we can just assume they got sent on a one way ticket to colonize the Red Planet in the name of the Soviet Union.

 

[The Tai-Pan]

So the USSR can get to Mars but no one else has even the hope to do, to save 300 lives? Lives that the West would value as fellow scientists and explorers? Just seems unrealistic.

 

[Tom_B]

Humor me with a reasonable estimate of what it cost the USSR to establish this colony.

 

[Garrison]

To be clear if the SpaceX Starship program achieves all its goals and you can exploit all the advances in technology since the fall of the USSR and all the information the various landers and rovers have gathered over the last 20 years then maybe a Mars colony will exist by 2050. All the Soviets are going to achieve trying to do it with rockets like the Energia in the 1980s, or worse the N-1 in the 1970s, is to collapse sooner.

 

[Alanith]

Humor me with a reasonable estimate of what it cost the USSR to establish this colony.

300 men on Mars? Conceding the Cold War 20 years earlier, letting the Warsaw Pact go its separate way, and paring most armed forces spending way back.

 

[Nell_Lucifer]

So the USSR can get to Mars but no one else has even the hope to do, to save 300 lives? Lives that the West would value as fellow scientists and explorers? Just seems unrealistic.

While other nations do have the capability to land on Mars they don't have the rockets or the infrastructure to produce enough rockets to save the people in a relatively short timeframe.

Humor me with a reasonable estimate of what it cost the USSR to establish this colony.

Too much. The N-1,Energia, Buran, Soyuz, Mir, Tu-144, Tu-160, No invasion of Afghanistan. A lot less spending on other projects but still, too expensive, leading to a much worse and harsher collapse.

To be clear if the SpaceX Starship program achieves all its goals and you can exploit all the advances in technology since the fall of the USSR and all the information the various landers and rovers have gathered over the last 20 years then maybe a Mars colony will exist by 2050. All the Soviets are going to achieve trying to do it with rockets like the Energia in the 1980s, or worse the N-1 in the 1970s, is to collapse sooner.

That is why this scenario is a failed colony. It can barely survive on it's own even in Option 2.
Hmm, I believe the collapse in this TL to be even worse than OTL even if it happened sooner.

300 men on Mars? Conceding the Cold War 20 years earlier, letting the Warsaw Pact go its separate way, and paring most armed forces spending way back.

300 men and women. This is a colony soooo. But yeah, to achieve that would be extremely expensive. (I am not sure if a Sea Dragon type of rocket build by Submarine dockyards would help to mitigate the cost... considering it was supposed to be much cheaper and simpler.)

 

[Garrison]

That is why this scenario is a failed colony. It can barely survive on it's own even in Option 2.
Hmm, I believe the collapse in this TL to be even worse than OTL even if it happened sooner.

It will likely fail before one man sets foot on Mars with the technology available to the USSR, let alone a 300 person colony. The sheer number of launches it would require is beyond any program of the time. Even doing it in the here and now depends on technologies that are still in development. Sea Dragon looks cool but I question if the USSR could produce such a rocket and if it would prove quite as cheap and simple as its advocates suggested. At huge cost and risk maybe they could pull off a flag and footprints mission but given the track record of Soviet/Russian Mars probes I wouldn't hold out much hope. There is simply no way the USSR could create such a colony.

 

[The Tai-Pan]

I will say, it would be a very tragic thing, for the rest of us on Earth slowly watch the lights on Mars go out. Talk about a devastating event to the space psyche.

 

[Lalli]

IMO this scenario is totally ASB. There is not way how Soviet technology could allow even one-way Mars travel. Even Americans hadn't technology for that. And establishing of colony of 500 is too impossible even to the Moon in such short time. You would need create effective supply line, build gigantic domes with its own air condition system so people can live there etc. It would be easier for Soviet make Moon landing if they try really hard.

 

[Jürgen]

This scenario is not technical a ASB, as the technology to do this is possible, but politically and economically it’s in my view ASB.

But that’s not necessary a bad thing, I think the scenario is really interesting and you would better off just handwave the economic aspect of reaching Mars away and make it a ASB timeline. Just as a Nazi Moon or Antarctica, a surviving Soviet remnant on Mars have a lot of interesting implications. One of the implications is that USSR establish far more infrastructure in orbit, including a shipyard to built or rather assemble the ship to Mars. You could also have the ship being a Mars cycle and have the ship deteriorating until it no longer can be used and Russia lack the capital to replace it.

 

[JohnBull]

The point is to have a Soviet colony abandoned or just a Soviet colony, period? If it's the latter, I don't see why USSR must fall. Butterflies alone could do the trick.

 

[Lalli]

This scenario is not technical a ASB, as the technology to do this is possible, but politically and economically it’s in my view ASB.

Yes, tehcnoligally it is posible but not with 1960's POD and use only 20 years to get somehow viable Martian colony. Even Americans couldn't do that despite them having better technology and more of money. It is about same if you would get tank divisions to Napoleon in few years or get WW1 with nuikes suing 1890's POD. Technology not go that way even if someone tries really hard. And there is too serious budget problem. If OP is going to make serious TL I ratherly would make that to ASB or Writer's Forums. TLs should have at least some level of plausibilty.

Or then one way is get way USSR to survive to 21st century and there beign US-USSR race to Mars. Even then colony wouldn't become quickly but it would be more realistic.

 

[cloistered scholar]

I've always been interested in the idea that the first missions to Mars would be one way.

Obviously you would want to send supplies first, but I think the mission is easier without requiring a way back to orbit, and then to earth.

Does anyone think there could be people who agree to this, possibly living the rest of their life on Mars?

 

[Cryhavoc101]

How about a scenario 1 with a minor Russian Civil war in the 90s that effectively abandons the colonists as the emerging Russian state finds itself incapable of supporting or recovering them.

The USA and ESA etc collaborating with others kick starts Mars Direct to initially support and then withdraw the Martians in what becomes a race against time as several disasters on the base start a failure cascade.

 

[Talwar]

Have to admit, the idea intrigues me from a narrative perspective. Even if the technical plausibility isn't there.

 

[Thisisnotausername]

Even granting that the Soviet Union can somehow establish this colony without changing things so much that the 1991 collapse is butterflied away, I don't think the conceit that rescue or resupply is impossible is realistic. You can't posit such massive advances in space colonization that it's viable to send hundreds of people to colonize Mars and then insist that the state of the art revert to OTL when 1991 hits. The colony might be stuck on its own for while, it might take a decade to get regular resupply going again and another decade after that before rescue can be sent or something like that, but the idea that there is literally nothing anyone can do, not NASA or Roscosmos or the ESA, not in 1991 or 2001 or 2011 or 2021, beggars belief. The only reasonable scenario in which I can imagine something like this happening is if you had a full-on nuclear war, or some equivalent catastrophe.

Similarly, the idea that these three hundred people could survive on their own indefinitely as Option 2 suggests is pure nonsense: you cannot maintain an industrial base at the level of sophistication needed to maintain a Mars base with three hundred people. You can hold the line for a while until you're rescued, a la The Martian, but if rescue isn't coming, you're not going to make any forward progress, slow or otherwise: you'll just be staving off the inevitable until one last vital thing breaks beyond repair and it's lights out forever.

 

[Garrison]

Even granting that the Soviet Union can somehow establish this colony without changing things so much that the 1991 collapse is butterflied away, I don't think the conceit that rescue or resupply is impossible is realistic. You can't posit such massive advances in space colonization that it's viable to send hundreds of people to colonize Mars and then insist that the state of the art revert to OTL when 1991 hits. The colony might be stuck on its own for while, it might take a decade to get regular resupply going again and another decade after that before rescue can be sent or something like that, but the idea that there is literally nothing anyone can do, not NASA or Roscosmos or the ESA, not in 1991 or 2001 or 2011 or 2021, beggars belief. The only reasonable scenario in which I can imagine something like this happening is if you had a full-on nuclear war, or some equivalent catastrophe.

Similarly, the idea that these three hundred people could survive on their own indefinitely as Option 2 suggests is pure nonsense: you cannot maintain an industrial base at the level of sophistication needed to maintain a Mars base with three hundred people. You can hold the line for a while until you're rescued, a la The Martian, but if rescue isn't coming, you're not going to make any forward progress, slow or otherwise: you'll just be staving off the inevitable until one last vital thing breaks beyond repair and it's lights out forever.

Which is the big problem even if you leave aside the plausibility of the Soviets building this Mars colony, you can't just have NASA bumbling about in LEO with a handful of Shuttles against this background. If nothing else there would be a political demand for a response and the US space program will be radically different.

 

[Athelstane]

It will likely fail before one man sets foot on Mars with the technology available to the USSR, let alone a 300 person colony. The sheer number of launches it would require is beyond any program of the time. Even doing it in the here and now depends on technologies that are still in development. Sea Dragon looks cool but I question if the USSR could produce such a rocket and if it would prove quite as cheap and simple as its advocates suggested. At huge cost and risk maybe they could pull off a flag and footprints mission but given the track record of Soviet/Russian Mars probes I wouldn't hold out much hope. There is simply no way the USSR could create such a colony.

IMO this scenario is totally ASB. There is not way how Soviet technology could allow even one-way Mars travel. Even Americans hadn't technology for that. And establishing of colony of 500 is too impossible even to the Moon in such short time. You would need create effective supply line, build gigantic domes with its own air condition system so people can live there etc. It would be easier for Soviet make Moon landing if they try really hard.

This scenario is not technical a ASB, as the technology to do this is possible, but politically and economically it’s in my view ASB.

But that’s not necessary a bad thing, I think the scenario is really interesting and you would better off just handwave the economic aspect of reaching Mars away and make it a ASB timeline. Just as a Nazi Moon or Antarctica, a surviving Soviet remnant on Mars have a lot of interesting implications. One of the implications is that USSR establish far more infrastructure in orbit, including a shipyard to built or rather assemble the ship to Mars. You could also have the ship being a Mars cycle and have the ship deteriorating until it no longer can be used and Russia lack the capital to replace it.

Yes, tehcnoligally it is posible but not with 1960's POD and use only 20 years to get somehow viable Martian colony. Even Americans couldn't do that despite them having better technology and more of money. It is about same if you would get tank divisions to Napoleon in few years or get WW1 with nuikes suing 1890's POD. Technology not go that way even if someone tries really hard. And there is too serious budget problem. If OP is going to make serious TL I ratherly would make that to ASB or Writer's Forums. TLs should have at least some level of plausibilty.

Or then one way is get way USSR to survive to 21st century and there beign US-USSR race to Mars. Even then colony wouldn't become quickly but it would be more realistic.

As fascinating as the idea of a forlorn dying Soviet colony on Mars is, I agree with the crowd here: With the point of departure given, this is pretty much ASB.

A (quite small) moon base by 1980 is at the outer margins of the plausible for the Soviet space program. The cost and technical challenges of a colony of 300 on Mars even by 1989 is just not a realistic prospect, even if you can shift the regime back to an absolute one man dictatorship again.