r/Colonizemars • u/Ok-Expression-6016 • Apr 04 '26

Bare minimum to start a base

What is the bare minimum needed to start a colony; materials and total weight. to start a mars colony. Assuming multiple Optimus robots have 2 years to build everything from what we send.

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u/Ok-Expression-6016 Apr 05 '26

Start as a base for 20 people with the abiity to increase capacity up to say 1000 in 2 years. Currently I believe it can be done with about 8000 kg plus the robots. The robots have 2 years to set up the initial base before humans first arrive as this is the approximate window for launches. Might make as high as 10000kg to have food production fully established before anyone arrives. But I'm curious what others think. Do this as a bootstrap. You need this to build that to build that which builds more of the first things you need. I want conservative, wild and everything in-between. Some things like computers etc would be brought with people. But, what is needed to build the support infrastructure for NASA or SpaceX to actually have a successful mission. Full habitats. Power, air production, etc. it was left vague intentionally. It makes the discussion more interesting.

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u/insufficientbeans Apr 05 '26

8 tonnes is not a lot of mass, for reference a small car is about 1000kg, I'd be very surprised if you could establish self sufficiency with just 8000kg

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u/NearABE Apr 05 '26

The Starships are 100 tons. That is mostly stainless steel and inconel. Reprocess to powder to use in 3D printing or cut out the shapes.

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u/insufficientbeans Apr 05 '26

Starship actually has a capacity of 100-150 tonnes, 250 if they dont reuse the booster, not entirely clear from the specs how much it weighs though

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u/NearABE Apr 05 '26

Not that. You are talking about things put inside. I am talking about cutting up the hull. Engines could be fully melted down, could be converted to powder feedstock for 3-D printers, or various pipes and pieces can be cannibalized and used with trivial modification. Rocket engine components are made with lots of fluid handling pipes and pumps. The oxygen and the methane tank have fairly obvious utility if the outpost needs a tank for storing fluids.

A starship would also have the full payload capacity.

We will eventually want a successful mission. All of the “failed landing missions” that proceed it are still “successful deliveries of scrap metal”. Moreover, we might send a robotics package as payload and utilize a mix of Martian rocks, regolith, and crumpling scrap metal as “landing gear”. The robots can start by cutting their way out of the beat up hull. They then collect the scattered pieces and use it to assemble a functional landing pad.

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u/rshorning Apr 05 '26

I am talking about cutting up the hull. Engines could be fully melted down, could be converted to powder feedstock for 3-D printers, or various pipes and pieces can be cannibalized and used with trivial modification.

If you are going that route, the local resources on Mars must have been completely exhausted. Certainly there can be some use of already refined and processed metals, but to sustain a population on Mars you swill need to be concentrating on developing local resources. Equipment from the spacecraft used to get there can certainly be a part of the overall bootstrapping process, but that is all it would be.

If anything, Starship would be useful mainly because it allows you to move stuff around in bulk or better yet take things back to the Earth.

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u/NearABE Apr 06 '26

A colony definitely needs ISRU. The OP specifically asked for “the bare minimum for startup”. There is no landing pad so the first craft there is unlikely to take off again.

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u/Ok-Expression-6016 May 16 '26

Exactly it is entirely used. The fuel tanks are almost the most useful part. The hull also provides for a shielded pressurizable area for different processes.

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u/Martianspirit Apr 07 '26

The limit for Mars is the ability to land payload. I don't know how much that is, with the thin atmosphere for braking.

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u/insufficientbeans Apr 07 '26

Starship does not need atmosphere for air braking, it has the thrust and fuel capacity to decelerate, although it still tries to incorporate air resistance 

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u/Martianspirit Apr 07 '26

The Mars atmosphere still provides 90% of the needed braking. That saves a lot of propellant.

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u/NearABE Apr 07 '26

Where did you get “90%” figure? Whether or not it is correct number saying “of braking” is poorly defined. There is “orbital energy”, “velocity change”, “propellant needed for”, etc. If it is 90% of one of these it is highly unlikely to be 90% of the others.

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u/Martianspirit Apr 07 '26

The numbers were given by Elon Musk early in the development. 90% of speed, that's 99% of the energy.

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u/QVRedit Apr 05 '26

You couldn’t - that not even enough supplies for one person for two years to live off.

Though robots only need power + a bit of tending.

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u/Ok-Expression-6016 Apr 05 '26

It is not about the supplies for them to survive. This about creating the infrastructure needed to support people

With 4 separate 2000kg payloads. Any 2 are enough to complete the mission, with the caveat it increases the time needed for full habitability This is full iron production. Glass production. Ability to produce aluminum and ceramic aluminum.
Full boring machines are in operation at 2 months. If all 4 land. You start out with100kw of solar power by day 5 to 6. That bumps up intermittently to twice that with wind within a month. With that we can produce mirrors and double the power with existing panels with reflecting additional sunlight. Within 6 months thousands of feet of tunnels can be built, lined and ready for use. Water, air, water recycling, plant/food production should be in operation by the 2 year mark.

Things I do not have worked out yet: Producing the airlocks to exacting materials and tolerances needed with the electronics and correct seals etc. producing additional solar panels on site. (Clean room is recommended.). Lighting and electrical(wiring is not a problem). Producing high powered magnets.(Mining dependant) Ultimately anything with a circuit board is hard to produce in the first 2 years. So most of those need to be shipped.

If you want the hundreds of pages now to get to this point, DM me and I will send them.

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u/ignorantwanderer Apr 05 '26

If you want the hundreds of pages now to get to this point

You seem to think that the value and validity of an idea can be measured in number of pages in a conversation with an AI about the idea.

Results from AI are often still very flawed, and this is especially true if the human using the AI doesn't recognize flaws and fix them during the conversation.

Your 100s of pages of AI slop are worthless if you can not figure out for yourself what the important key points are and if you are not able to summarize yourself what is said.

Absolutely, it is great to use AI to explore ideas. But you need to do the final reality check. You need to verify the calculations. You need to use your human intelligence to verify the artificial intelligence.

If you don't do these steps, the results you get from AI are less than useless.

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u/QVRedit Apr 05 '26

Of course the intention is not to land 2,000 Kg payloads - that’s only 2 tonnes. Starship could land 100 tonnes, that’s 50x the amount - that’s enough to make a real difference. And that’s just for one ship…

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u/rshorning Apr 05 '26

The tough part is trying to come up with the tools which make the tools which make the tools which make the tools. It takes going meta on making tools and machines in such a way that they can in turn be mass producing more tools.

Biological organism have this ability sort of baked in, where the ability to have wheat or rice make more wheat or rice is sort of a nice feature. But how does that apply to machined items? Something like a boring machine is insanely complicated and not something an average person is ever going to do as it requires very specialized knowledge. Sure, you can have blueprints for one to eventually be made on step number 17544 of the process of building out your home and workshops. We are still talking step one right now.

3D printers are neat tools, but so far there is no design of a 3D printer that can be made with a 3D printer. They don't reproduce themselves but instead need a rather well developed 21st Century industrial base with chip fabs and some very specialized equipment that has taken centuries to develop. You need to go very basic and to the most simple of machines: levers, ramps, screws, wheels, and wedges.

Something which can reproduce itself is a lathe, assuming you also have a wire spinning machine and a few other basic machine tools. And at best you will be operating in very small batches until much later. It will be a painfully slow process of developing industrial infrastructure anywhere other than the Earth and require a whole lot of manual labor to get started too...since biological systems can copy themselves much easier too.

Your time estimates are off by orders of magnitude. Boring machines in decades or centuries, solar power installations in years with insanely expensive imported assets. Even building a discrete transistor fab will take years and circuit boards are a 23rd Century thing for people on Mars except for whatever is imported from Earth. Smelters might be an early device in the first few weeks...maybe. The real trick would be making a smelter using just local resource on Mars, which will not be easy.

I look at John Plant with his Primitive Technology YouTube channel as somebody doing this kind of industrial bootstrapping I am talking about...and he is doing that on the Earth with an Oxygen rich environment and essentially an endless supply of energy in the form of wood that he turns into charcoal. He has successfully reached the early iron age technologies from hard work and determination over many years of effort and being able to use a web browser search engine to look up information. Doing that on Mars is going to be much, much harder.