Engineering and the Human Conquest of Hostile Environments: Design for a Space Mission (up close and personal)
All you need to know about space and interplanetary exploration bottled for easy consumption for writers, space fans and DIY space vehicle construction (don't try this at home folks). A walk through the speaker's experience working on the Cassini/Huygens mission to Saturn & Titan in designing an experiment that had to survive the journey, and then the harsh conditions on the surface of Titan. Then, what are the environmental constraints and engineering imperatives for Venusian colonization imposed by the environment?
Mark English: writer, ex-astrophysicist who worked on the Cassini/Huygens mission to Saturn as experiment designer/developer and other real-life space missions.
Douglas Van Belle, Ph.D: Senior lecturer, writer
As a science teacher for the past 40 years, I would have LOVED this session!
Also, I figure one of the participants HAD to have been Derek Künsken, whose novel HOUSE OF STYX appeared first in ANALOG Science Fiction and Fact, and will be published as a hardcover in April 2021 – he MUST have been there! His novel is incredibly real and intersectional in that the complex, cumulative way in which the effects of multiple forms of discrimination such as racism, sexism, and classism intersect (combine, overlap) in the experiences of marginalized individuals or groups.
Künsken didn’t interest himself in ONLY the physical aspects of Venus and its exploration and colonization, but also in the people who were the colonists. His approach to the Venus is far, far beyond that of, say CS Lewis, Edgar Rice Burroughs or even Ben Bova. The problem of course, is that our understanding of extreme Solar system environments change daily. Even in my work in progress, I have to read constantly to know what “current” is on Mars; and when or if it’s published, the data will be dreadfully out of date!
Maybe that’s the biggest problem faced by those who are trying to make plans for landing on the surfaces of the various bits of flotsam and jetsam.
In my River Universe, Humans have had experience exploring Jupiter – but the engineering here is biological. The Confluence of Humanity has essentially no taboo on the genetic engineering of Humans. But, giving free reign for science to do whatever it feels it should do, has given rise to a backlash. The Empire of Man has become an empire of hard technology and to a divide between levels of genetic engineering. If you are more that 65 percent Original Human DNA (as defined by the first results of the Human Genome Project in 2003), you are legally Human. If you are NOT 65% or more, you are NOT entitled to the protections and laws of Humanity.
At any rate, I think that this was supposed to be about engineering for survival in brutal environments. Think: the surface of the Moon. It’s airless, lightless (half the time), and the temperature variation swings from 127 C to -173 C a swing of some 300 degrees. How do you not only dress an astronaut for that, but design MACHINERY for that?
Let’s try the more hospitable Mars: temperature variation there is 138 degree swing. Venus? A 188 degree swing – but both of these planets have atmosphere. You’re talking something entirely different if you want to look at survival in raw space.
How can you design stuff to work reliably under conditions that are so far outside of those needed to sustain Human life? Well, apparently, that’s what scientists and engineers are trying to do. I even ran an essay about how we’ve yet to actually CONQUER the oceans on Earth – we can’t even survive well on three fourths of our HOME WORLD! How can we expect to survive on alien worlds? (https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2018/03/slice-of-pie-exploring-solar-system.html)
How would you design a rover for Venus? We’ve sent rovers to the Moon, Mars, and even dropped probes to the surfaces of comets and Titan, one of the Moons of Saturn. Obviously sending Humans to any of those targets would be an entirely different challenge, but engineers are going to need to do it. So, what would a surface probe of Venus look like? Most scientists figure that such an undertaking would be impossible! How could we possibly design anything that would survive those conditions? The heat and pressure alone would destroy anything we made and dropped down to the surface. The RECORD for the survival of Human engineering is 127 minutes for the Russian Venera 13 lander.
Most Venus-explorer types insist that surface exploration is moot. We will need to explore with balloons set adrift in the high atmosphere and perhaps drop gliders…
What if we genetically engineered creatures like, say squirrels or bats or something else we could armor and then let them fly in huge swarms? Hmmm…excuse me while I go work on an idea!
Program Book: https://sites.grenadine.co/sites/conzealand/en/conzealand/schedule
Image: https://spectrum.ieee.org/image/MjkzNzA1MQ.jpeg
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