There are some interesting features that can be useful to explain to challenges of space habitation.
The above picture contradicts a lot of the literature I’ve read on space habitation. A lot of works say that the Earth’s gravity is the only major road block to being a fully spacefaring species. This graph, however, places the sun’s gravity as the major obstacle to accessing the resources of Mars. Escaping Earth only places a space craft 1/3 energetically to Mars. Moving from Earth to an orbit around Jupiter will be even more energy intensive. Making it seem that a Moon colony would be more efficient then a Mars colony.
However, the sun has one benefit. The sun’s gravity well will allow for easy transport back to Earth from our habitations. Rare materials will be cheaper to bring back to Earth, ignoring the whole atmospheric reentry thing.
The above picture is support for orbital space colonies. An orbital colony does not have to escape a planet body twice. They only have to deal with getting their passengers and supplies to orbit. Plus, going to orbit is cheaper energetically then leaving Earth orbit.
Reactions
-This model disregards anything that could reduce the effect of each plant’s gravity well (orbital motion, for example), do you still fell this is a decent way to look at the gravity wells in our solar system?-The idea of a Venus habitation have been tossed around for a while, does the acceleration by the sun’s gravity make the risks worth it?
Resources
Image Source: Munroe, Randall. “Gravity Wells.” XKCD. n.d. Web. Accessed 31 December, 2009. <http://xkcd.com/681/>In Case You Skimmed
- The sun’s gravity will add onto the energy needs to leave a planet’s surface.
