Strategic, Technological and Ethical Aspects of Establishing Colonies on Moon and Mars
- Paper number
IAC-07-A5.1.05
- Author
Mr. G. Madhavan Nair, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), India
- Coauthor
Mr. K.R. Sridhara Murthi, Antrix Corporation, India
- Coauthor
Dr. M.Y.S. Prasad, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), India
- Year
2007
- Abstract
With the vast experience gained by Aerospace Community in the last five decades, the natural future course of action will be to expand Space Exploration further. Our understanding of Moon is relatively better with a number of unmanned satellite missions, and manned missions to Moon carried out by the leading Space Agencies. Also a number of unmanned Satellite Missions and Surface Rover Missions were carried out to Mars by the leading Space Agencies deriving a lot of new details about Mars. Hence the future exploration will be centered obviously on Moon and Mars. It is heartening that NASA had declared its plans for establishing a Surface Base on Moon and developing the technical infrastructure required. The Surface Bases on Moon and Mars raise a number of strategic, technical and ethical issues both in the process of development, and in the process of establishing the bases. The strategic issues related to Moon and Mars Surface Bases will be centered around development of enabling technologies, cost of the missions, and international cooperation. The obvious path for tackling both the technological development and cost issues will be through innovative and sincere international cooperation. This cooperation can take many forms like – all capable players joining a leader, or sharing of the tasks system wise, or all players having their independent programmes with agreed common interfaces of the items being taken to and stationed on the surface of Moon / Mars. Each model has its own unique features. Among the technical issues the first one is the Mission Objectives – why the Surface Bases have to be developed and what will be the activity of the Crew on the Surface Bases? The Surface Bases have two types of characteristics – one equivalent to those of orbiting Spacecraft, and other that of survivability on the Mars / Moon with their specific atmosphere, gravity and surface characteristics. Moon offers excellent advantages for astronomy while offering difficulties with respect to solar power utilization and harsh temperature variation. Hence the technical challenges depend on a number of drivers starting from Mission requirements. Obviously the most important technical parameters to be addressed by anybody will be in the areas of Crew safety, crew survivability including contingencies, and in-situ resource utilization. Towards this, the systems which will be much different than what had been developed so far will include specialized space suits, rovers, power and communication systems, and ascent and descent modules. Amongst the ethical issues, the biggest one is whether humankind from Earth is targeting ‘habitation’ or ‘colonization’ of Moon / Mars. The next question will be whether the in-situ resource exploitation will be only for carrying out further missions to other planets from Moon / Mars or for utilization on Earth. The third ethical issue will be the long term impact on pollution of Moon / Mars due to technologies employed for power generation and other logistics on the Surfaces. The paper elaborates the views of the authors on the strategic, technical and ethical aspects of establishing Surface Bases and colonies on Moon and Mars. The inherent assumptions and gray areas under each category will be explained with the resulting long- term implications.
- Abstract document
- Manuscript document
IAC-07-A5.1.05.pdf (🔒 authorized access only).
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