Mudskipper: A Mars Colony Ship

To boldly go beyond Earth’s orbital neighborhood is the next level of courageous, crewed exploration. We’ve gotten good with low Earth orbit. We were once getting good at spending a few days on the Moon — something we must again get good at before we take the next step: the other planets. To make it to that step, we’ll need a spaceship purpose-built with the idea that that crew will be gone for protracted amounts of time and will likely set up camp somewhere else.

There have been myriad proposals tossed off in recent years about the next goal for crewed space missions. The Chinese have targeted the Moon. On a separate path, Roscosmos (Russia) wants ESA (Europe) and NASA (USA) to join with it in also visiting our nearest neighbor. Personally, this is a no-brainer to me. If we don’t get good traveling just 400,000 km away, the rest doesn’t matter. There’s been talk of going to an asteroid, but there’s little reason to do so if your purpose is exploration. Asteroids raise mission risks too high — far beyond what can be achieved practically with robot missions. The only way this makes sense is to have the intent on mining asteroids for profit — but that’s a different mission statement.

So, we go to the Moon. Then what? Then…we go farther out. To Mars, yes, but why not also consider Venus? Or Europa or Titan? In 1961, with just a few Soviet orbits and one American sub-orbital journey, a US president put forth the idea that we go from there to the Moon in under 8-1/2 years. Madness. And yet, it was done. To journey beyond the Earth, I believe, requires this sort of bold thinking.

The Mudskipper

Enter a new sort of spacecraft — one created with outer-solar system exploration and planetary (i.e. Mars) colonization designed in. While it can return to Earth, it’s build is more with long-term exploration and permanent settlement in mind. It is designed to be in-flight repairable, have multiple redundancies, and be constructed as simply as possible for mission success, but no simpler. The idea being that the fewer things that can go wrong will tend to lead to fewer things that will go wrong.

The ship is large. From tip to tail it is about as long as the Saturn V was tall. While it is filled with supplies, it is as closed a system as possible, capable of recycling just about everything on board to keep its standard crew of twelve safe and healthy for thirty years or more.

This astonishing feat of longevity is a direct consequence of having an excess of electrical power available from its two reactors. While the ship can run on just one, it’s the excess power that allows the crew to maintain the ship without using up valuable consumables.

Everything on the ship is built with technologies that are tested, due to be tested, or well into research. For the most part, it is built from recyclable polymers, fabrics, and light metals — the idea being that there is little about the ship that can’t be repaired, replaced, or jury-rigged by the crew if necessary using only the materials on-hand. Except for the loss of both reactors, there should be few events that could cause an end of mission scenario.

In the post due to follow, I’ll describe in more detail the different parts of the ship.