MIT Researchers Cast Doubts On Feasibility Of Mars One Project In New Report

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
An independent evaluation of the Mars One project, a Netherlands-based effort to establish the first human colony on the Red Planet by the year 2025, suggests the project is likely to fail unless new technologies are developed to help keep residents alive.
In fact, according to Time.com’s Jeffrey Kluger, the MIT engineers behind the new study report that colonists would begin to die within 68 days of landing on Mars due to a lack of breathable air. There is also uncertainty over whether or not the mission hardware could function in microgravity and other logistical factors which could make Mars One technically unfeasible.
The authors of the study developed a detailed settlement-analysis tool in order to assess the feasibility of the mission, which is headed-up by Dutch entrepreneur and mechanical engineer Bas Lansdorp, and found that if food was obtained from locally grown crops as intended, the vegetation would produce unsafe levels of oxygen.
That, in turn, would set off a chain of events which would ultimately cause the residents of Mars One to suffocate. In order to avoid this scenario, the MIT researchers said that a system would be required in order to remove excess oxygen from the atmosphere – technology that has not yet been developed for use in an extraterrestrial environment.

“The problem begins with the lettuce and the wheat, both of which are considered essential crops,” Kluger said. “As lettuce matures, peaking about 30 days after planting, it pushes the O2 level past what’s known as .3 molar fractions, which, whatever it means, doesn’t sound terribly dangerous – except it’s also the point at which the threat of fire rises to unacceptable levels. That risk begins to tail off as the crop is harvested and eaten, but it explodes upward again, far past the .3 level, at 68 days when the far gassier wheat matures.”
“A simple answer would be simply to vent a little of the excess O2 out, which actually could work, except the venting apparatus is not able to distinguish one gas from another,” he added. “That means that nitrogen – which would, as on Earth, make up the majority of the astronauts’ atmosphere – would be lost too. That, in turn, would lower the internal pressure to unsurvivable levels – and that’s what gets your 68-day doomsday clock ticking.”
Slashgear’s Brittany Hillen also reported that there is a possibility the urine recycling system, which is the same type as the one used on the International Space Station, could fail – as it has previously on the ISS. The authors also report that assumptions that settlers would be able to melt Mars surface ice for drinking water is based on technology designed to “bake” water from the soil. However, that technology is not yet ready for deployment.
“The team also performed an integrated analysis of spare-parts resupply – how many spare parts would have to be delivered to a Martian colony at each opportunity to keep it going,” Jennifer Chu of the MIT News Office explained on Tuesday. “The researchers found that as the colony grows, spare parts would quickly dominate future deliveries to Mars, making up as much as 62 percent of payloads from Earth.”
The analysis also found issues with the number of rockets required to establish the colonies and the cost of the journey. Chu said that the Mars One plan calls for six Falcon Heavy rockets to carry initial supplies to the Red Planet prior to the arrival of the first colonists, but the MIT team said that those figures were “overly optimistic.”
Instead, they determined the supplies required to get the colony off the ground would require a total of 15 Falcon Heavy rockets, and that the transportation costs for the first part of the mission alone would be $4.5 billion. The researchers noted that the cost would increase as more astronauts and supplies were sent to Mars, and did not account for the additional cost of developing and purchasing equipment for the mission.
“We’re not saying, black and white, Mars One is infeasible,” said MIT professor Olivier de Weck, a member of the team that presented the findings earlier this month at the International Astronautical Congress in Toronto. “But we do think it’s not really feasible under the assumptions they’ve made. We’re pointing to technologies that could be helpful to invest in with high priority, to move them along the feasibility path.”
“One of the great insights we were able to get was just how hard it is to pull this [mission] off,” added graduate student Sydney Do. “There are just so many unknowns. And to give anyone confidence that they’re going to get there and stay alive – there’s still a lot of work that needs to be done.”
—–
FOR THE KINDLE – The History of Space Exploration: redOrbit Press
—–