The Martian Colony Collapse

Dateline, April 13, 2047.  The Mars colony, begun in 2024 under the leadership of commercial interests from Earth, has experienced ecosphere collapse.  The delicate balance of plants, microorganisms, and humans within the fragile domes failed last week, and the Mission Leader, Kai Musk, announced that without evacuation or supplies from earth, the entire population, exceeding one hundred thousand persons, will perish within six months.  The Earth Mars directorate of the European Union, which is the governing authority for the colony, announced that there is no technical means available to evacuate even a fraction of that population, and the fastest that even the most advanced Starship III rockets cannot arrive in less than three months, and even then the entire fleet can only deliver a month worth of supplies and return with about five hundred colonists.  The International Council on Space Exploration, an international body that brings the space programs of all space faring nations together for cooperative action, has begun to investigate alternatives to save as many as possible.

In September of 2024 the first permanent habitation on another planet, the Mars Boer Memorial Habitation Dome, was established on Mars.  Within two years over a thousand early colonists had emigrated to the red planet, and the first ecosphere biodomes were under construction.  The colony grew with constant supply of both materials and colonists for the next decade, and by 2036 had reached over seventy thousand inhabitants.  The project was applauded as the first major permanent step to lifting humanity beyond our single-planet origins.  In 2047 disaster struck.  A previously unknown, and completely unaccounted, mutation in a microorganism maintained to support root health in some of the critical plant species of the hydroponics farms caused the organism to replicate rapidly and uncontrolled, consuming large quantities of precious oxygen and killing the plants that depended on it.  The problem was not detected in time and rapidly resulted in an unrecoverable loss of biodiversity in the carefully managed ecosystem.  The colony leaders appealed to earth for help, but the best technology then available still required months to travel from earth to mars at the best of times, and this was far from the best time as the planets were near their greatest distance apart.  General scientific consensus was that there simply was nothing that could be done to assist the colony with current technology.

In May of 2047 a previously unknown spaceship arrived at Mars.  Carrying almost two thousand tons of supplies, and with return capacity for a thousand individuals, this new vessel was built by the then almost unheard of Pleiades Corporation, and was an untested prototype with a fusion rocket power plant.  The supplies allowed a partial recovery of the hydroponics, and the return capacity relieved a little of the need, as well as beginning an orderly evacuation process for non-essential persons, mostly children.  This new vessel was capable of transit from Earth to Mars in between two and five weeks, and could return as quickly, thanks to the immense power reserves and consequent delta-v capability.  Over the next several months the ship made several round trips to Mars with critical supplies and returned with around a thousand evacuees each trip.  In February of 2048, however, Mars experienced another disaster, this time the nuclear power reactor, a commercial modular molten salt reactor of two gigawatts capacity, failed.  This was not the only power source on the planet, but it was a critical baseload system and while the built in safety features of the system meant there was no destruction and no radiation release, the power for the colony was lost.  Once again the continuing efforts of The Pleiades Corporation transport, now two of them, brought necessary supplies and continued to ferry evacuees off planet.  The loss of power could not be completely managed, however, and more than twenty thousand volunteers moved to an older colony shelter in an attempt to survive without burdening the main colony systems.  That shelter failed a few weeks later and all occupants perished.  With the closer approach of the two planets the Pleiades Corporation flights reached a weekly cadence for a while, and one of those flights was able to deliver a new fusion power plant, but this was still not sufficient to save the entire colony, so evacuations continued.  The final disaster was a meteorite impact that destroyed the solar arrays for the colony in December of 2048.  By then the relief ships were back to four weeks per trip, and the corporation had not succeeded in building more, the second pair of ships were experiencing construction delays with the, still experimental, engines.  The final relief ship arrived in July of 2049.  By then the colony was down to less than ten thousand individuals, as the disasters and other effects continued to charge a cost in lives.  The ship took another thousand back to earth, and half way through that voyage the final transmission from the doomed colony reported an outbreak of virulent influenza had taken all but three individuals, and those three were unable to maintain basic life support systems.  Automated monitoring reported the last deaths four days later.