Waning: science ahead!
Like a lot of you, I am a scientist (amateur) myself. I was once paid to do it for a time at an undisclosed location in the central Nevada desert, but now I'm just an engineer. Everything in this chapter is my own research and ideas. I haven't seen it anywhere else. The data are correct, and the processes are well known.
We can do this.
Inspiration
"Mark, can you get that end for me," Frank Watney asked. "Sure, dad," Mark answered. The green house was coming along. He lifted the end of the securing brace and held it in place as his father installed and tightened the retaining bolt.
Mark and Mindy were taking a long weekend and visiting his parents in Chicago. His father had bought a salvaged green house from a local nursery, and Mark was helping him re-assemble it in his parent's back yard. The twenty foot wide by forty foot long steel framework in the shape of a half cylinder took one day to assemble and now they were placing the large rectangular polycarbonate panels in the curve walls and roof.
"You'll have tomatoes into December," Mark said with a grin.
"That's the plan," His father said. "Citrus trees too, got dwarf lemon, orange and lime trees on order at the same nursery I bought this from." He grinned. "They made me a deal."
"The high intensity LED lighting strips I brought with me will help in the spring and fall." Mark said. "They're the same kind I used on Mars."
His father smiled. "That'll be good," he said as a car pulled into the drive. "Ah, Belle and Mindy are back."
Mark smiled. "Great, let's start the barbeque!"
(*)
An hour and a half later Mark and Mindy were walking through the half completed greenhouse. "This will be great," Mark said. "Dad had one for me when I was in my first four years of college, but it was little. We can really grow some stuff in here."
Mindy hugged his arm. "Yeah, we should get one, but greenhouse in Florida is kind of redundant," she said with a chuckle.
"No enough room anyway," Mark said. "And the home owners association would have a cow."
Mindy smiled. "Cow, yeah, we should get a cow," she said playfully. "That'd piss them off."
Mark laughed. "You hate the HOA, I get it."
"Whereas you think they're all wonderful people," she chuckled. "All you wanted to do was put in food plants instead of decorative crap."
"Dumb asses," he said snidely.
"Too bad you didn't have this on Mars," she said, looking around the nearly assembled greenhouse.
"Oh, yeah," Mark said. "Three of these and I could have kept the crew fed indefinitely."
"Is that so?" Belle Watney said as she walked up to her son.
Mark hugged his mother, he took every opportunity to do it he had. "Yeah, Mom," he said. "NASA is planning food production in hab like structures because shipping panes of glass or plastic to Mars is prohibitive. But being able to use sunlight for even fifty percent of the light would be a huge savings in energy production."
Mindy nodded. "Too make it worthwhile we'd have….to," She stopped in mid-sentence and stared at nothing. Her mouth hug open and it looked like she was barely breathing.
"Min…" Marks mother started and Mark shushed her.
"Come over here," Mark whispered to his parents and led them away from Mindy and out of the greenhouse. He turned back toward the green house to watch his wife. She hadn't moved at all.
"What's going on, Son?" His father asked.
Mark smiled at them and pointed at Mindy. "That is what happens when a genius has a brainstorm." He laughed. "Could be a new way to arrange the knives in the kitchen, but I'm thinking something bigger."
Mindy stood stock still for almost five minutes. When she came back to herself she looked around and found that Mark and his parents were sitting outside the green house on lawn chairs waiting for her. She walked up to them with an embarrassed smile.
"How long?" she asked Mark.
He chuckled. "About five minutes. Well?"
"I have to talk to Alex," she said seriously.
(*)
Four weeks later Teddy Sanders, Annie Montrose, Venkat Kapor, Bruce Ng, and twelve other directors and engineers were gathered in Teddy's briefing room.
"Alright, Mindy, Mark, you've got us here," Teddy said. "What's this 'great idea'?"
Mark smiled, and Bruce nodded for him to start. "A few weeks back Min and I went to Chicago to help my dad put in his new greenhouse. When we were assembling it Min had a revelation." He laughed and turned to his wife. "A really big one. Min?"
She rose from her chair and went to the front of the room. "We were talking about the food production plan and all the extra Hab materials that it requires," she said. "It also will be a huge power issue. We have to convert sunlight to electricity and then back into light. That's never even close to one hundred percent. The solar panels, the Hab materials, cable, and equipment for food production are equal to all the rest of the supplies put together. I think we could make most of the materials for greenhouses, and frankly a lot of other structures, onsite at Mars."
Bruce smiled crookedly at the stunned expressions on the faces of the other directors. He'd been working with a small team on Mindy's idea for the last four weeks, and he was very confident that she had come up with something that would change the direction of the whole of the effort.
"It requires two spacecraft," Mindy continued. "The glass foundry and the garage." She tapped her tablet and a cross-sectional diagram of the foundry and the garage appeared on the screen behind her.
"The glass foundry consists of a mobility system, a material processing front end, a nuclear fired furnace with four crucibles and two spares, and the testing lab for quality control," she said, pointing to the pertinent sections as she did. "The garage holds six one third size six wheeled multipurpose rovers, their tools, and the ancillary gear to maintain the system."
"Using SLS in Block Two Cargo config we launch the foundry first, and then follow with the garage two weeks later. The glass foundry spacecraft consists of the foundry itself and the sky crane landing system. The garage is the same. At Mars both the foundry and the garage follow the standard sky crane deployment that we've perfected over the years, but this time we don't crash the cranes. I suggest we load the cranes with communications gear, fly them to high points, soft land them, and use them as ancillary central communications points."
"Should have been doing that all along," Teddy said, shaking his head in wondered amusement. "Keep going, you're doing fine."
"Thank you, sir," Mindy said with a smile. "The foundry would need to be mobile so we've designed it, and everything else really, to run on the standard curiosity titanium/aluminum wheels. The foundry and the garage will require ten on each side. In the two weeks between the arrival of the foundry and the arrival of the garage we would drive the foundry to its initial operating location and level it. When the garage arrives we drive it to the foundry, deploy its solar farm and its rovers in their analysis configuration, and begin quarry selection."
"The sand at Schiaparelli seems to be excellent for our purposes, we just need to find a suitable, accessible, dune. Once we select our first quarry we drive the rovers back to the garage and change out the heads from analysis to the loading and material handling heads. The loader head is much like a standard front loader here on earth. The material handler is designed to manipulate the finished blocks and by products."
She took a breath and a drink of water. Chancing a glance at her audience she saw that they were eagerly waiting for her to continue. That's a good sign, she thought.
"The next step is road building. We config four rovers in loader and, in a maneuver that Bruce and the JPL team have devised, drive them out to the quarry and make a road for easy traversing back to the foundry as they go. They each take a bucket load at the quarry and head back to the foundry. I've designed the hopper to accept ten loads before it's full. We send the rovers back in sequence, and they load the hopper. Then we fire the foundry."
"We'll be using heat tech that's been in use for a long time in the nuclear power industry. The crucibles, made of zirconium oxide ceramic, will resemble rectangular tubs with very thick basses. In the base of the crucibles will be rows of side to side horizontal tubes. The foundry processes the sand, sifting it down to melt size and extracting as much of the impurities as possible. The internal load system loads the processed sand in the crucibles, the crucibles are vibrated to settle the material, and then the rods with the nuclear fuel are slid in from each side of the crucibles. When the rods get inside the reactive distance they heat up the crucible. When the complete melt is achieved the sample arm takes a ten gram dollop of the glass and transfers it to the testing lab for quality assurance."
"The crucibles are then passed to the annealing area. When the glass is cool enough for extraction, the crucible is inverted, and the block is removed and stored in the annealing chamber for three days as it cools. Once cool, the blocks are ported from the side of the foundry, and a rover in material handling config stacks it with the others."
"Each crucible will make a two foot by four foot by one foot thick block of Martian Glass. In the sift and process at the front end we will extract as much contaminate from the silica as we can, but we anticipate a good deal of iron will be left behind. In fact we're counting on it. Iron in the silica mix gives the glass a very pretty pale green color, but more importantly it increases the UV and cosmic ray blocking characteristics of the glass. Our calculations indicate that, at one foot thick, the foundry blocks will have the same resistance to radiation as an inch and a quarter sheet of lead."
The other directors looked stunned.
"Yeah," Mindy said nodding. "We can build almost everything with them. Depending on how we finish the panels they can be transparent to nearly opaque. Since we aren't making soda glass, but instead making fused silica quartz glass, there are a few considerations. One is that you will get the block as it is. We can grind them, but heating and reshaping is out. The second is that the blocks will be very tough, much tougher than the glass you're used to. The panels will have a tensile strength of 400 PSI and a huge point impact resistance. Thermally they have an R value of 35, but that is directional if we use some coatings for specific applications. The thermal characteristics are so stable that we don't have to worry about expansion and thermal stress fracturing. The panels will have a mass of seventy-seven to eighty pounds and a Mars weight of around thirty-five."
"The team at JPL that Bruce and I have been working with believe that we can achieve a twelve block per day rate on average. With an eight by eight airlock opening at each end, each forty by forty Quonset structure would require four-hundred and seventy-four blocks. At twelve a day we'll be making enough blocks that every forty days we can have enough blocks to build another structure. If we butt the structures together we take seven days off that."
"The framework will also be made from the sand with a separate foundry eventually. We would have to send the framework for the first few, but after we have boots on the ground we can hunt out a titanium deposit. There seems to be a lot on Mars, as it shows up in the dust in a large percentage."
"We assemble the framework, lay a floor of hab canvas, put the blocks in place, install the airlocks, and seal the edges and gaps with our standard resin."
Mindy looked back up at the stunned directors. "For the cost of sending just the food production Hab components for Ares five we could send a factory that makes these blocks for as long as we need it to. When the local resource is exhausted the foundry and the garage move to another location and begin again."
She pulled a small, pale green glass block from her briefcase. It was two inches on a side and a quarter thick. "This is what the glass will look like," she said, and she passed the block to Teddy. "It's a fused silica glass with the same chemistry as we find at Mars."
There was a full minute of silence, and then everyone spoke at once.
Mark, Mindy, and Bruce took questions for the next three and a half hours.