When a Mars Simulation Goes Wrong
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Touching exposed wires (what the heck), turning on the wrong port on a switch (how can they not fix that them self?), nobody answering an EMERGENCY phone? Obvious safety issues not being taken seriously by other participants...
Seems like a wonky experiment gone wrong that is pretty distant from testing a Mars experience with people who actually might go to Mars.
Telecom people build them all the time for remote mountaintop sites with kWh/day loads much greater than their habitat. They can't ground things properly and have exposed wiring? For the multi million dollar budget, inexcusable.
I could build a better power system than what I've seen pictured for well under $80,000 in one time equipment expenses.
This article focues on how the medevac compromised their experiment. How about their failure to adhere to proper engineering standards compromised their experiment? Nobody wants to take the blame.
Edit: Here is a photo of their pv setup. All COTS stuff. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mars-nasa-hi-seas-project-hawai...
Real NASA systems would need to be orders of magnitude more safe/reliable, but I suspect this experiment was at least partially designed to identify potential failure points that engineering solutions need to be built for (I.e. what things can a human fix safely and what needs failsafes and self-healing).
I'm guessing the habitat has a battery bank of at least eight 12v 100Ah batteries (if AGM lead acid, or equivalent capacity), and at minimim one 4000W sine wave inverter feeding several 120v 15a circuits. Also sounds like somebody shocked themselves on the AC power side, maybe the generator transfer switch, maybe just exposed wiring. Either way there are safe ways to do temporary ac power with twist lock receptacle extension cables and distribution boxes that are insulted up to 600 or 1000V and won't shock people.
You'd think that setting up electrical for something like this would be covered under whatever contract the union hammered out and be done by university employees who do all the other electrical which would at least ensure it's not too dangerous.
>I could build a better power system than what I've seen pictured for well under $80,000 in one time equipment expenses.
You're not working with the overhead of a publicly funded university.
Hence "I could" not "An university employing me at some level could".
- If it's true that the system was not properly grounded, that raises the question of how a real Mars habitat would be grounded and did they even try to have that thought process?
- Without knowing the real voltages / amps involved there's no real way to know if an outside medical intervention was necessary. For example people who work on Navy subs, I mean you presume there are people on that crew who know that stuff in complete detail.
2. It isn't about the amps/voltages at all. It's all about heart strain, which is why they made note of the chest pains the victim was presenting with. With electricity, there are two main injuries to cope with: burns and cardiac arrest. In this case, it sounds like a brief discharge without any burning electrical arc, so no burns. The chest pains would seem to indicate that the current passed through the heart and surrounding pacemaker nerves, long enough to perhaps clench and strain the muscle (pulled miscles/soreness leading weakened low pressure), or stop the heart, denying blood flow, which can damage both heart and brain tissue. With brain tissue damage due to oxygen deprivation, loss of blodd flow, it would resemble a concussion. Based on the provides description of the event, CPR wasn't necessary, so figure it was electrically induced heart strain and not full cardiac arrest.
Honestly, the whole thing sounds like a sort of staged social experiment, to see how a personality mix devolves, amid a stressful, seemingly life-threatening incident.
The phrase 'As primitive as a farm in Vermont' jumps out at me. These people have no idea what there talking about, any farmer would know how to test pH and NPK values of the soil and take tissue samples for analysis, there's a lot of data involved in farming, not to mention it being one of the few industries to utilize gentic modification.
I don't think this setup uses microinvertersb because it is highly inefficient to charge a battery bank by first having ac power, convert to DC, them back to AC to run loads.
I highly doubt the person who was shocked was shocked from the DC side, more likely they touched an exposed 120v 15/20a circuit on the AC load side.
I can't really blame that woman for leaving the experiment.
I think the real problem is that Hawaii apparently has loose electrical safety regulations. Where I live, you're not allowed to wire your own fuse box. It might even be a criminal offence, but no homeowner would ever do that. If there are exposed live wires, then some electrician is responsible for that failure.
Does anyone remember STS-107 Columbia accident? That tragedy showed what was wrong with NASA safety culture.
And cutting over to the emergency generator is something that happens rarely.
It's unconscionable that they didn't have NEC compliant covers over all exposed wiring. And they shouldn't even be flipping breakers (unless interlocked) to transfer power, they should just be flipping a transfer switch.
If they really need to get to the wiring to fix something, it only takes a minute with a screwdriver to take off the cover.
Eh, I'd say even with experience it's hard to drill in, because someone with experience has probably brushed up against something running supposedly lethal voltage once in their life, and walked away with only a startle and a tingly arm, breeding complacency
Simply start the generator and the battery bank begins receeiving charge. There are pv charge controllers (Schneider electric) which support generator auto start based on a low voltage threshold.
Not touching a wire is easy to do. If you can't do that perhaps you shouldn't be participating.
Accidentally touching a live wire is very easy to do, all it takes is a moment of inattention when you put your hand down or a reflexive action to catch a dropped flashlight.
That's why electrical code doesn't allow any exposed wires, even in breaker boxes in a locked utility room.
Wires have to be insulated and then they need to be covered. Either run through conduit or with a second insulating jacket ala Romex.
If we are talking about 100's at a time, then there would be doctors, engineers, surgical facilities, public meeting areas etc. Presumably the initial settlement will take place in one place not in lots of isolated areas? Early trips presumably would be setting up the space-port and living facilities, making rocket-fuel etc. I think with work to do and with more people and more space to wander around the social problems would be rather easier to bear
Meteoroids presumably are more devastating still because of the thin atmosphere. Some interesting analysis - http://spaceacademy.net.au/env/planet/marsmtrts.htm
Mars Colonization in our lifetime is fantasy. Not necessarily from technical but from purely economic perspective. You can't make near time colony self sufficient and maintaining it would require billions in subsidies year after year.
Economically speaking Mars would not achieve economies of scale needed for becoming self sustaining.
Manufacturing every component for higher safety standards than commercial aircraft or nuclear submarine is expensive. Building whole society that works in safety critical environment 24/7, starting from daycare and ending with microprocessor and chemical plants is just fantasy in the near future.
Maybe in 100 or 150 years we can start dreaming.
That's why colonization must start on the first mission. Flags and footprints missions are self-defeating.
>You can't make near time colony self sufficient and maintaining it would require billions in subsidies year after year.
The US alone already spends $5 billion per year on ISS.
ISS has crew of 6 located 400 km from the surface of the Earth. In the emergency they can leave the station in minutes (in two Soyuz capsules). Time between the decision to leave and landing in Kazakhstan is 3.5 hours or less.
What's the relevance to cost here, anyway?
At this point it’s pretty clear that with low enough launch costs orbital industry will be a big thing. All sorts of high performance materials can only be made in microgravity:
* Better optical fibers with ZBLAN (happening today) and better optics in general with zero-g glass forming
* whole new alloys which can’t be made in normal g due to density separation. Think better nickel superalloys, and guess what the price per kg could be
* much larger, purer, more perfect crystals of all sorts for semiconductors, drug development, etc
* artificial tissues and organs grow better when not under their own weight
Launch costs are dropping fast today, but will eventually probably plateau someplace north of $50/kg until we can move past chemical rockets, which IMO is fantasy in our lifetime.
As long as launch costs stay that high, it’s strong incentive to develop mining and refining capacity on Mars. The gravity well is so much shallower than Earth that for any destination past LEO, you’re saving money launching from Mars.
Martian materials won’t be used on Earth for centuries, if ever. But $50,000 / ton Martian steel + Martian launch costs will be cheaper than ~free Earth steel + Earth launch costs within our lifetimes, imo.
Everything you say is argument for not going to Mars but develop industry in the Moon, close Earth asteroids or in the Earth orbit. Mars is in the bottom of big and expensive delta-v well just like Earth.
If asteroid mining becomes profitable, Mars can never compete. It has no microgravity, no enough sunlight, corrosive soil and dust everywhere. It's just a lifeless desert in deep delta-v.
Having small economic settlement inside near earth asteroid could be economically sound idea. Most of the work would be done by semi-automatic robots and people on Earth but maybe there is need for on-site crews as well.
I don’t have the expertise to really compare asteroid mining to Mars, but I’m suspicious of the fixed infrastructure costs. Mining and refining takes a lot of mass. Replicating that mass for each object you want to mine or flying it from rock to rock both seem like significant costs. Perhaps we’ll find a big Goldilocks rock that’s near Earth, will stay near Earth for a long time without insanely expensive capture maneuvers, and contains all the materials we want, but I think Mars has a better shot.
Mars also has much friendlier conditions for propellant manufacturing, which is an important factor in these cheap launches.
Metals on asteroids are easier to extract. Some asteroids, like 16 Psyche are almost solid chunks of metal. Asteroid ice (oxygen and hydrogen) can be turned into rocket fuel with electricity from solar panels.
Single asteroid close to the Earth can supply all the needs on earth for centuries.
16 psyche is one of the 10 most massive objects in the belt. The belt is more than twice as far away, and transfers to it are much more variable over the years than the fairly regular Mars windows.
Finding the “Goldilocks” object that supplies all our needs, can be regularly reached economically, etc etc isn’t an easy problem.
Also, water gets you hydralox propellant, which is a bit of a pain in the ass. You really want organic compounds too so you can do methalox, which is one more constraint on Goldilocks.
[0] https://m.phys.org/news/2013-05-curiosity-mars-rover-drills....
And then to sustain this massive operation you need a massive demand. You'd need millions of tons of steel of demand to make the colossal investments (of perhaps billions/year) viable. And then the demand for the primary applications needs to be even larger. I don't know much about the applications you've cited, but I'd find it hard to believe you could get demand in tens or hundreds of billions per year. They look essentially like niche applications that can be fulfilled by a low-cost launch system. Remember that the FH costs about $1700/kg (and cost probably be cut in half or better with several billions in annual demand).
I.e. I'm not convinced. That said, I think under a very long term (perhaps by the end of the century), the objective of a self-sustaining colony is worthwhile.
Before economic viability of any enterprise, a massive amount of systems will need to be developed enabling manufacturing basic tools and materials in situ. It's basically reinvention of industry from scratch but with much more strict requirements and much thinner margins for sustenance. A first step would be probably local production of solar panels, food, structural materials, habitats. The basic elements of self-sustenance. Then gradually moving up the technology ladder until import dependence from Earth would be at a minimum. Only then it starts to become viable and thinkable to have small martian exports for orbital systems, tourism, culture and media (I imagine showcasing life on Mars would get quite an audience on Earth), perhaps low-bandwidth scientific computing. This will probably take centuries but is an important step for humanity. Sooner or later we have to get off this rock, there's an entire universe out there waiting for life...
Tell Elon, not me
> We've sent robotic gear to Mars and most of it has failed. Gear that doesn't require air to breathe, water to drink, food to eat and that can be just abandoned there.
Whilst humans appear squishy and delicate compared to a robot, unlike machines they are very adaptable. For instance a robot that is a million miles away with a broken power supply lead is lost because even a simple repair is impossible. An air supply unit that breaks to a room with humans in has a much better chance of being repaired by the humans. The humans could abandon that room, wear space suits for a while, fly home or fix it with duct tape. There is no reason top believe it is harder for humans to survive, just because the robots find it hard.
Maybe that's the point, the "emotional blackmail" approach to space funding? Apollo could be cancelled because cancelling Apollo didn't involve abandoning anyone to death. If people are stuck on Mars with no way to return, then indefinite regular resupply trips will become necessary and it will be politically impossible to cancel the budget for them. The space program ceases to be discretionary spending.
(Even if it is a private mission, e.g. SpaceX–if US citizens on Mars are reliant on a private corporation for their continued life, then the US Congress may find irresistible the urge to provide public support to that corporation or to have NASA take over its resupply functions.)
But really how do you not have rcd power supplies in this sort of context!
Does Nasa stuff run on AC? I can't see a reason why you wouldn't want something like mains power for the crew being 12v dc for most applications and only a few things like an oven or high wattage device needing more. Kettle?
While there may be an argument to make for more risk-taking in science, with space travel itself being among the likeliest candidates, I don't see how it applies to this situation.
Remember that every one of these simulated missions provides hundreds or thousands of examples for indidividual human interactions each. That's an indication of the amount of data needed to draw applicable conclusions. Allowing people to die could never approach those levels. Any conclusions would also be tainted by the nature of these experiments as simulations far more than any other events–because "is the result worth the price" would be the dominating question.
But this accident was caused by something that many people have already died from and has already been solved by common electrical code requirements.
If someone is going to die or be injured during one of these experiments, it shouldn't be from a well known risk that has simple mitigations.
> If the crew goes rogue, the people back on Earth might have no idea. Some degree of eavesdropping on the crew might be necessary.
So what we really want is competent, relaxed people who can handle 6 months of downtime in tight quarters.
Just like the life in the sea, aviation or in the ISS, Mars mission will be going trough checklists and routine inspections and preparation for emergencies. When something goes wrong it's the end of the downtime.
Were the Hi-SEAS astronauts trained to the same level as a NASA ISS astronaut? Unlikely.
Should a future Mars simulation have at least one highly experienced EMT, if not an actual emergency physician? Yes.
Should a future Mars simulation have at least one person with considerable experience in electrical engineering, computer science or avionics systems? Yes.
Beyond that, their schedules will be jam packed. They're going to be spending hours per day exercising, hours in diagnostics and maintenance, hours in training, hours in general work (pathing, communications, logging, running experiments, etc) and then hopefully getting an hour or two to themselves at some point before doing it all over again the next day. And that's before they even get to Mars, which is when the real work begins.
When you're tens of millions of miles away from Earth there are countless things that can go wrong, and a good chunk of them end up with everybody dying. By contrast there are very few paths to a completely successful mission, and maximizing the chances for that is going to entail an enormous amount of work and energy.
I'm not sure it could be justifiably argued that Capt. Gibson didn't have "The right stuff".
STS-27 came really close to disintegrating while landing.
> STS-27 Atlantis was the most damaged launch-entry vehicle to return to Earth successfully.
Remarks like "I'm not a doctor, but it could be a heart attack or something" don't instill much confidence in the quality of the experiment either. It's also telling that first responders refer to them quite bluntly as "fake astronauts."
If everyone clucks like a chicken on Day 7, is it because that’s what happens under these conditions or is it because the software developer from New York saw it in a movie and thinks that’s what the scientists want to see? They’re even quoting lines from the Martian while they are in the simulation.
They are playing make believe. This is not science.
It may still be useful to see what kind of cults develop there. If I had to guess, I'd say the experiment planners want to discover how to manipulate people into the right kind of cult.