Our best hope to reach the red planet might be to send just one person there ... forever.
I once worked in America’s Manned Space program, proud to be one of perhaps a quarter million folks around the world trying to send humans into space. We like to think it’s humanity’s destiny to spread out across the universe, but less than one out of twenty-five thousand of us on this planet are really doing anything toward that goal.
There was a time when human space travel was big business. Forty years ago, nearly half a million Americans worked on NASA’s Apollo Moon landing project. It probably absorbed 2 to 3 percent of our gross national product. Today a much diminished manned space program limps along on the tax donation of about a dime a day from each American. Unnoticed by most people, NASA’s crowning achievement, the International Space Station, passes silently overhead. It’s mostly a symbolic outpost, too small and not in the best of orbits, but nevertheless a testament that cooperation in space appeals to many nations. To generate excitement in a rather apathetic public, the periodic crew exchanges on the Space Station are called “expeditions,” a term inappropriate in reference to a space hotel. New space programs (for example, the recent Chinese achievements) are carefully choreographed events with heavy publicity. China, India, and other nations are repeating early NASA adventures that had a strongly unifying affect on American society.
Optimism abounds for privately sponsored space activities, but human space travel, for at least the next couple of generations, will remain so costly that only nation-states can afford it. A private tourist joy ride that goes fifty miles up into the sky is a far thing from the massive, exotic, and expensive equipment needed to get a person into orbit around the earth. The occasional tourist who hitches a ride on a rocket up to the International Space Station pays a fee that bears little relationship to any real cost. In the United States, the aerospace industry has consolidated down to only a few firms. These large corporations dominate by colluding to form non-competitive joint ventures, taking turns holding government contracts and by aggressively buying any new start-up companies that seem likely to succeed. This lack of true competition virtually insures that space travel will remain expensive.
For years NASA has basked in well-deserved praise for enabling twelve men to walk on the Moon. But half the people alive today weren’t born in time to watch that spectacle unfold, and these are the younger and most vibrant folks in our society. They know nothing of the tremendous excitement that came when the world collectively held its breath and watched those brave astronauts step out into that hostile place. Since then, many future directions for NASA have been proposed, but none as audacious as the one I discuss here: sending a single astronaut on a one-way trip to Mars, to establish a permanent colony.
The Grounding of Manned Space Flight
The fulfillment of President John F. Kennedy’s pledge to land a person on the Moon was due in part to JFK’s tragic death. No politician dared seriously question funding a popular program that honored the dream of a beloved dead president. JFK had thought about conducting the Moon effort in peaceful partnership with the Russians to help diffuse the Cold War, but after his death that idea was never revived. Americans wanted the non-military, non-secretive Apollo program to be a clear-cut competition between the voluntary capitalism of our “Free World” and what we viewed as a Russian communist slave-labor police state.
Funding, talent and enthusiasm were never lacking in this endeavor, and NASA was very lucky. Early on, its young managers made excellent and daring technical gambles. For example, the decision to plan the mission around a rendezvous between two spacecraft orbiting the moon was controversial, radical and brilliant. The program proceeded at breakneck pace, astronauts died in airplane crashes, and the tragic Apollo 1 fire killed three of them, but NASA overcame all setbacks in short order, and instead of discouraging progress, the setbacks just spurred it on.
But Apollo ended prematurely, with several Moon landings left unaccomplished. Layoffs released thousands of technical experts to take new jobs in older, more mundane American industries. They brought inventiveness and modern methods to everything from computers to airplanes, to machine tool automation, quality control, and the management of information. Funding for NASA stagnated, and there was a corresponding stagnation in progress. There was no lack of good new ideas, but programs were slow to start, and some with great potential were begun and later abandoned. With no firm goals and an uncertain future, NASA had trouble attracting the best and brightest workers. Today there is a steady brain drain as old hands retire. NASA maintains records of what worked, but gradually the agency is forgetting just what didn’t work—what was tried or thought about, but later abandoned and why. Problems and failures are not well publicized or discussed. This is tribal knowledge, and in this village, the elders are leaving, a fact which doesn’t bode well for the future.
A thousand years from now historians may agree that Apollo 11 represented the apex of our unique American civilization, perhaps even the all-time peak of human achievement. Placing Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong on the Moon was difficult, expensive and risky. The world saw the Moon landings as peaceful, grand, and altruistic. This was America’s gift to humanity and perhaps the greatest milestone since we quit living in caves. Foreign respect for this country was never higher. In the forty years since the Apollo era, there has been no proposal to do anything in space that would recapture that same level of excitement, until today.
A New Program—A New Beginning
A couple of years ago, I began to encourage people to think about a radical new manned space program, a concept as dramatic and audacious as President Kennedy’s words when he said we would “go to the Moon in this decade.” I realized that we have enough technology now to mount a similar, decade-long effort to place one astronaut on the planet Mars. But that first explorer would not be able to return.
He or she would live out their lives as residents of an alien desert world, completely dependent on regular resupply missions from earth. If we can eliminate the requirement to launch that person off of Mars to bring them back, we remove a major obstacle to mission practicality. Carrying enough rocket fuel to the surface of Mars to permit a launch back into space for a return to Earth, or else somehow manufacturing fuel on Mars for this launch is a technical problem with no solution likely in the next twenty or thirty years. There are current plans for a robotic mission to return a one- or two-pound sample of Mars soil for study. But even the simple rocket needed to bring such a tiny amount of dirt back from Mars will be heavy and technically difficult to land on that planet. For a one-way human mission, significant engineering problems remain, but without the need for a Mars launch, we can plan a program within the scope of available or near-term technology.
Life support and resupply would also be greatly simplified if there is only one astronaut, but perhaps the first human mission might consist of two people; maybe even a male/female team. That privileged couple would follow in the tradition of the creation stories of many earthly religions. The pair would become more than just historic, they would become legend.
Like the Apollo missions, a manned Mars effort must surge forward and accomplish the goal in a short time. A decade of development culminating in the human landing would be reasonable. Any longer time frame (for example, twenty-five years) and the program would never resist diversion of money. Very long time horizons would invite expensive, frequent redesign and bureaucratic paralysis, the same issues that delayed the first flight of the Space Shuttle for years, doomed NASA’s old Space Station Freedom to nothing more than paper studies and now threaten to turn the Constellation Moon landing program into an expensive multi-decade boondoggle.
There must be consistent and unfettered funding. We don’t have a “Space Race” anymore to motivate the country, but perhaps the personalities of the astronaut candidates could be popularized so that sending a hero to Mars would elicit strong interest and feeling. Astronaut selection might be a public process like a talent contest where we get to know the contestants and root for our favorites.
Issues Raised by Skeptics
Many people have responded to this idea since it was proposed and I’d like to address some of the most common objections.
First, though the idea of going on a one-way trip sounds daunting, there would be no lack of well-qualified, perfectly sane volunteers with the required combination of talent and temperament. Determining the best mental and physical skill sets will be interesting. The current selection process for astronauts would only be a starting point since this mission is dramatically different and the human personality that is needed may be more akin in nature to those who choose to explore deep underwater caves alone, or engage in other self-reliant, lonely, dangerous endeavors. The risks would be high, but the trip wouldn’t be suicide for the astronaut. Let’s not forget that risks in the Apollo program were also daunting. After six Moon landings there was a desire on the part of some to quit before sustaining any fatalities. This worry contributed to the unpopular and probably wrong decision to terminate the program even before NASA had used all the expensive hardware they had built. The Space Shuttle disasters remind us that space travel is inherently dangerous (see sidebar).
Is it ethical, or perhaps the question should be, will it be immoral for a person to volunteer for a high-risk, no-return trip to Mars? This answer is so fundamentally revealing of personal human beliefs in the meaning of life and death that this one-way trip to Mars proposal was chosen for discussion in theology classes at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. The inevitably of mortality would seem to leave the timing and placement of death, and the worth of the life lived to be the real issues.
Some suggest the lonely astronaut would go crazy. But the explorer would always be in constant communication with earth. He or she would know that, back home, concern and sympathy was consuming everyone. We would watch the astronaut’s every move via live television, relish struggles for self-preservation, celebrate innovation, and of course admire bravery. International tensions would diminish when most of the world tunes in to this dramatic situation. We would all become aware that man has a common bond transcending culture or religion. This singular event could usher in a new age of global fraternity. And in time, other volunteers would join the original explorer. Future generations would devise a practical way to return people from Mars if indeed they would choose to return.
The second issue people often raise is that the technological challenges are too great, but I believe we’re closer to solutions than skeptics think. Less than fifty years elapsed between the Wright Brothers’ first powered airplane flight and the era of supersonic rocket planes and jets. Similar dramatic technical progress has occurred in the half century since the first man blasted into space. Nevertheless, folks greatly underestimate our current capabilities in the area of human space travel. For a manned mission to Mars, there are far fewer unknowns today than those puzzles faced by Apollo program engineers. Apollo’s success depended heavily on equipment that had not even been invented at the beginning of the program. For example, in the early 1960s transistors were only used in battery-powered toy radios. Engineers gambled that high-powered transistor equipment that was rugged and would require far less electricity than vacuum tubes could soon be perfected. Computers occupied entire floors of buildings, but it was dreamed that a navigation computer could be made tiny enough to put on a spacecraft. Another technical hurdle was that no one had ever made a big rocket that burned liquid hydrogen, the highest-energy fuel. Nevertheless, NASA gambled that they could develop a safe one. If any of these technologies not worked out, the Apollo program would have failed.
As far as manned Mars missions, it is a mistake to focus right now on particular “solutions” to the technical problems because initial solutions become targets for skeptics and are usually superseded by much better ideas. But we can discuss some of the obvious problems to get an idea of what technology needs to be developed.
In 1952 the visionary German rocket engineer Wernher von Braun published a technically feasible plan for placing a team of fifty people on Mars and returning them after six months on the surface. Most recent studies of manned Mars missions envision small crews of perhaps six or eight. The problems and expense for any manned program are dramatically reduced if we design around a crew of only one person. The weight of objects being routinely landed on Mars has grown dramatically (above). The Mars Science Lab scheduled for launch in 2011 features a Rover the size of an SUV that weighs one ton. Robots can stand heavy deceleration and severe landing jolts. A manned lander must treat its occupant better. The human spacecraft must decelerate in a way that doesn’t subject the passenger to deadly loads. And while the thin Mars atmosphere is a convenient brake that can reduce some of the need for retro rockets, it requires the Lander to have a protective thermal heat shield.
Today we can only be assured of landing on a spot within five miles of an aim point. Obviously the re-supply missions will require some sort of system to assure much more accurate landings, perhaps some sort of Global Positioning Satellite system or other navigational aids.
Finally, there’s the issue of life support. On the surface of Mars, these systems would almost certainly be powered with small nuclear/electric generators of a type that have already been proven on many other programs. Space suits for use on Mars would be fundamentally different from those designed for the Moon because the environments are so different. But, there is no reason to believe they couldn’t be developed in short order.
Perfecting all this will be a major research/development endeavor for the manned Mars program, and of course, some new technology won’t come cheap. When you do anything the first time with brand new ideas it’s hard to predict how much it will cost. But the job is simplified when the Lander is light, as would be the case with a solo mission. Moving from our current demonstrated capability to land a thousand-pound vehicle, to what might be needed for a forty thousand pound Lander that carries several astronauts would be a great stretch. Obviously, a five to ten thousand pound Lander carrying one person would be far easier to develop.
It’s fortunate that Apollo focused on the goal rather than the expense because, in those early days of space travel, nearly everything had to be created from scratch. But costs will be mitigated for a Mars trip because today we already have a very mature space industry. Its existing infrastructure includes ground test facilities, launch sites, crew training, tracking and communication networks, and manufacturing capabilities. There are people who have worked in this business all their lives. Compared to the 1960s, we now possess far superior materials, much better knowledge of human factors, health and food science, advanced capability for design and analytical automation, miniature electronics, fantastic computers, superb quality control methods, etc.; the list of modern wonders is endless. If managed properly, a manned Mars program might even be cheaper (in terms of gross national product) than the Apollo Moon program, especially if we partnered with enthusiastic, emerging space-faring nations like China and India.
It also needs to be pointed out that space technology doesn’t just cost money. It provides economic advantages. Benefits from earlier space programs are everywhere, but seldom recognized. As a trivial example, consider that the ubiquitous liquid hand soap dispenser used all over the world was invented in the 1970s for astronauts on the Skylab space station. Among the more visible spinoffs are the space-based communication systems we rely on for television and telephone, direct descendants of the experimental satellites NASA built after private industry balked at assuming the cost and risk. The use of space for earth photography and weather monitoring, resource detection, navigation, and many other things are now taken for granted.
There’s also the long-term health of our society and economy to consider. For the Apollo program, NASA spent billions of dollars inside the United States creating jobs. A handful of foreigners with critical skills also helped, notably the German rocket experts who immigrated here after World War II, and some outstanding Canadian engineers who moved south when Canada’s aircraft industry floundered. But basically, Apollo was an all-American project. Overall, Apollo received a high national priority and folks in every state were proud to be a part. College enrollments in engineering and science surged and the entire U.S. educational system from bottom to top benefited from the new “Space Race.” A manned Mars program would in a similar way reinvigorate science, improve our schools, create jobs, and spin off important new ideas and inventions.
Why Mars?
NASA’s new Constellation program is supposed to eventually take astronauts back to the Moon, but since this project is underfunded, progress will be slow. Former Apollo 17 astronaut and geologist Harrison Schmitt wants us to go back to the Moon to exploit valuable minerals that might make a Moon base pay for itself. But, any Moon colonization would probably be just as expensive as a solo manned Mars landing and economic benefits from Moon mining are hardly assured. Profits are theoretical and the argument is reminiscent of earlier unfulfilled expectations about harvesting minerals from the deep ocean floor.
Besides, men have been to the Moon on six trips, and it’s a horrible place. The high vacuum lunar environment is more hostile to life than the low-pressure carbon dioxide atmosphere on Mars. There’s also the two weeks of lunar darkness every month, heavy solar radiation, extreme cold in the shadows that face deep space, and searing heat on surfaces that face the sun. These problems don’t exist on Mars. The sharp-edged dust on the Moon will damage mechanical devices and irritate the lungs of explorers. The dust on Mars is more like that on earth—smooth since it’s wind-blown.
The public seems apathetic about returning Americans to the Moon and over time there will be pressure to cancel Constellation. Some have proposed that a risky trip by astronauts to an asteroid would recapture public interest. This mission would be a good way to develop the vehicle and technology for Earth-Mars transit since the hazards to humans of any multi-month sojourn in deep space are similar. Of course an asteroid visit would not be in the same historic league as a manned landing on Mars.
There are other viable proposals to put people on Mars, besides a one-way trip. But, they all have a major flaw: None could be accomplished in our lifetime. Workable concepts have been around at least since von Braun’s pioneering feasibility studies. Recent proposals require that we develop exotic new technologies (for example nuclear-powered rocket fuel manufacturing equipment to take to Mars). It would take many decades to develop that hardware. Moon walker Buzz Aldrin has been saying we should establish a colony on Mars (instead of returning to the Moon), and he supports a one-way trip for the colonists. But he wants an initial crew of perhaps six. A crew this large would require a long and costly development program because of the sheer size of spacecraft, habitat- and life-support systems, and more numerous resupply missions. Starting with a large colony is attractive, but the cost and development time are dauntingly greater than for a solo astronaut mission.
As another alternative, the Department of Defense has a very large budget for space-related work and a manned Mars program might be viewed as competing for this money. NASA once offered peaceful alternatives to the temptation to militarize space, but then the Space Shuttle came up short of development money and had to take the task of launching military satellites to save it from cancellation. The antique thirty-year-old Space Shuttle is still treated like a state secret and subject to U.S. restrictions on technology transfer to foreigners (the International Traffic in Arms Regulations and the Arms Export Control Act). Such restrictions discourage cooperative ventures in space.
Today, the military hardware we make and the arms technology we invent is acquired by others and sometimes used against us. It doesn’t have to be like that. The same firms that produce for the Defense Department can also work on a peaceful Mars landing job. Truly, this would be beating swords into plowshares. Technicians and manufacturing infrastructure thus peacefully engaged would always remain available for use by the weapons industry, should that be needed. When the United States maintains a large, organized pool of highly talented persons in the space business, it discourages foreign military competitors. Inside our own borders, instead of relying on massive military spending to stimulate and sustain our economy, a manned Mars space initiative would do the same thing.
With the recent success of the Pathfinder and Phoenix missions on Mars, some people ask why we don’t just leave Mars to robots (left). Robots certainly have growing capabilities. Today on the harsh Antarctic continent, robots wander around collecting meteorites. In water-filled Mexican caves robots swim down to look for new life. Indeed robotic Landers even went to the Moon before humans to learn if the surface might be buried under a deep layer of dust.
But machines are built to investigate certain puzzles: for example, are there organic life forms or maybe water? Human missions are fundamentally different since manned exploration is about adventure, excitement, challenge, and unexpected discoveries. A human can observe and instantly react. The data link for robotic operations on Mars features a delay of several minutes for the radio signals to transit deep space. Self-directed autonomous travel by rovers on the Martian surface is too risky, and operation by earthbound drivers remains tedious.
A National Imperative
One final objection to a Mars landing is that it really doesn’t need to be done. Before we embrace that view, we should note that it is not unusual for modern endeavors to seem frivolous. Few people today labor to produce critically needed items, like food or shelter. Our goals, wants, and often irrational desires are driven by social propaganda. Even what we call “work” may be just a term for the personal inconvenience of doing something for others. On close examination, many modern so-called jobs are exercises that add little utility or value to anything. Only in the future, when there will be a perspective on the mission’s historical impact will we be able to state with certainty if it was worthwhile for a human to travel alone to Mars with no plans to return.
I believe it does need to be done. We need a fantastic non-military national endeavor to stimulate our technical sector and reunite the nation in a single, grand, and dignified effort. By struggling with a worthy challenge like this, America can regain the respect and admiration of the world. This program would achieve that far better than a thousand ships sailing away loaded with our surplus grain or an army of Peace Corps volunteers. We need to see a brave person leave this planet for another world to distract us from increasingly mundane modern lives and refocus our attention on the beauty, uniqueness, and higher possibilities of mankind. After a million years, human technology is finally, but just barely, up to embracing this challenge. Any delay may make it impossible to ever mount such an adventure. This is not something that can be postponed. Future generations might not ever colonize Mars. They could leave that to machines.
There is in the human spirit an urge to see our species off on this last and greatest of all adventures. It makes the heart beat faster to imagine the wonders the daring explorer would witness, discoveries we would all share in from afar. We need to act now before we have no choice other than to be passive observers, watching an emotionless toy on another world move across a television screen. It will not be the same as watching one of our own.
Huddled around campfires on countless nights, our primitive ancestors looked up at the starry sky and puzzled over the brilliant orange point of light that was Mars moving across the heavens. I don’t know how or why our puny species achieved dominance over the earth, but I do know that today we can finally choose to send one of us to live on that orange point of light in the sky. We must make it our destiny!
James C. McLane III is an engineer in Houston, Texas. These days he works in the oil and gas industry on tasks quite different from his previous career in NASA’s Manned Space program. Previous articles by him have appeared in The Space Review and Harper’s.
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