Mission to Mars

17/07/2009

Forty years after the Moon landings, we find out why Mars must be our next stop

by Laura Kelly

Forty years ago this week, mankind achieved the most mind-blowing of feats, possibly the most amazing triumph of science and certainly the most public. The world watched as on July 20, 1969, two men – Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin – stepped from the lunar module Eagle and became the first humans to stand on the surface of another world. 

Over the next three years 10 other Apollo astronauts followed them onto the dusty surface of the Moon to gaze back on the lonely blue ball that is our home. The last of these brave explorers, Commander Eugene Cernan, of the Apollo 17 Mission, left the moon in December 1972, bidding farewell with the final, hopeful words: “America’s challenge of today has forged man’s destiny of tomorrow.” 

In reality, with costs spiralling and public interest dwindling, NASA was about to cancel the remaining Apollo missions and since the day Cernan spoke those words no human has gone beyond low orbit. Our exploration of the solar system seemed finished.

Now, however, renewed hope is building that man may not be done reaching for the stars, and may even be ready to start working towards a mission to Mars, which could answer some of the biggest questions human beings have ever asked. 

In America, former aerospace industry executive Norman Augustine is expected to report back from his review of human spaceflight next month. Despite the hard economic times, supporters of the programme have been heartened by his statements so far. 

“I am a real believer in the value of this nation’s human spaceflight activities and will do everything I can to provide the information needed to help the country maintain the spectacular arc of progress NASA has fuelled for five decades,”he announced at the launch of the review.

Even more significantly, in Europe the first steps are already being made towards sending people to the red planet. In Moscow, six volunteers have just come out of a 105-day isolation designed to simulate the social and psychological effects of a trip to Mars. 

“It is a satisfying feeling to take the first steps in a long journey that will culminate in the future with seeing European astronauts on Mars,” says Jennifer Ngo-Anh, exploration life scientist and the programme manager of the Mars500 project for the European Space Agency (ESA).

Of course, the psychological effect on the pioneering Mars-bound astronauts is just the first of many obstacles facing a possible mission to our planetary neighbour. 

The question must still be asked whether we have the technological capability to send human beings millions of miles farther away than anyone has ever been. Rod Pyle, author of Destination Moon and expert on the history of human space travel, has no doubt that we can do it. 

“In many ways we had the capability [to send people to Mars] in the ‘80s if we had pursued it,” he says. “The technology had certainly been designed. There were endless studies about going out there with Apollo-era hardware but it wasn’t followed up because the will wasn’t there.”

Despite the advances in the hardware, Dr Ian Crawford, director of the University of London’s centre for planetary science and adviser to ESA, warns we shouldn’t underestimate the difficulty of going to Mars. “Compared to going to the Moon, it would be so much farther away, so much more expensive and so much more dangerous,” he says. 

“I don’t think it’s practical from where we are now to suddenly go straight to Mars. We need to do more work on the effects of zero and low gravity.”

Crawford believes it could be 50 years before we’re even in a position to make the decision of sending people to Mars. 

First, he says, we should do a trial run in which astronauts spend eight months in the space station orbiting Earth, to simulate the weightlessness of the journey to Mars, followed by a year on a base on the Moon, to approximate the low gravity they’d experience on arrival, and finally another eight months on the space station before returning home. “You could learn a huge amount about the practicalities of sending people to Mars by going to the Moon and using it as a dry run,” he says. 

“Because the Moon is only three days away, if at any point it became clear that the human physiology or psychology wasn’t coping, people could be pulled out, which you could never do if they’d been committed to going to Mars. 

“In addition, we could be learning a great deal about the Moon and what it has to tell us about the early history of the solar system.”

Currently, NASA broadly agrees with Crawford. Until the Augustine review comes back, US President Obama is still committed to George W Bush’s promise to send people back to the Moon before 2020. According to The Mars Society, a group dedicated to “furthering the goal of the exploration and settlement of the red planet” through research and lobbying, this is a colossal waste of money and time. 

Bo Maxwell, managing director of Mars Society UK, says men could be standing on the surface of Mars in 2019 if space agencies would follow their Mars Direct plan, developed by his American counterpart in the society, aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin.

Zubrin’s plans were devised as a rebuttal to the NASA proposal drawn up under George Bush Snr, which said it would take $450bn and 30 years to get men to Mars. His breakthrough was to question whether all of the fuel for both the outward and return leg of the trip needed to be brought with the astronauts. Zubrin argued that this was a waste and that the fuel for the astronaut’s return could be manufactured from Mars’ atmosphere.

“That was the basis of this low-cost mission, because once they realised this, they had cut about 500 tonnes from the payload weight of the spaceship needed to send humans to Mars and bring them back,” says Maxwell. He adds that their plan would cost one-tenth of the NASA budget and could be landing people on Mars in 10 to 12 years’ time.

Although some dismiss Mars Society as zealots – Crawford says they have “an almost religious attitude to sending people to Mars” – their plans have had an effect on official thinking and in 2003 NASA and ESA’s joint study confirmed their sums added up. Nonetheless, in the middle of a recession, a $45bn budget would be a tough political sell and governments may be content to continue the current – much cheaper – strategy of sending robotic explorers instead of human adventurers. 

The position is supported by some heavyweights of the scientific world, famously including the late James Van Allen, who discovered the Van Allen radiation belts around Earth. 

In 2004 he wrote: “Almost all of the space programme’s important advances in scientific knowledge have been accomplished by hundreds of robotic spacecraft in orbit about Earth and on missions to the distant planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.” 

He added that there is no “compelling rationale” for continuing to send people into space. “The only surviving motivation for continuing human spaceflight is the ideology of adventure.” 

Adventure is certainly part of the appeal of human spaceflight, says Dr Ian Crawford, but even that could present cultural gains. 

A Mars mission could be the catalyst for persuading thousands of school kids to take up the sciences, benefiting our knowledge-based economy. Seeing as the mission would likely to be a joint programme between nations, it would be an inspirational act of co-operation with international significance.

But those are fringe benefits. The real advantage in sending people to the red planet is that they could answer one of the more vital questions humanity has asked – are we alone? No robot probe has so far been able to discover the answer to David Bowie’s simple question – is there life on Mars? – but both Crawford and Maxwell, along with many others in the scientific community, agree that people have a much better chance. 

Using drills developed for oil exploration, Professor John Parnell from Aberdeen University suggests humans would be capable of drilling much further into Mars’ crust, therefore possibly getting deep enough to find fossilised evidence of life.

Crawford even says there might be tiny creatures still alive a kilometre or so beneath the red dust, in pockets of the Martian permafrost that are so deep they are warm enough to be liquid. 

“There are micro-organisms on the Earth that live in exactly such environments,” he argues.

The discovery of life on one of our nearest neighbours, no matter how primitive, would of course suggest the likelihood of higher forms existing elsewhere in the universe is very high – but there is another more pessimistic reason for setting up a base on Mars. It could be a lifesaver should Earth become uninhabitable. CERN

physicist and TV presenter Dr Brian Cox explains: “One of my great heroes [American astrophysicist] Carl Sagan said that if the dinosaurs had had a space programme, they’d still be around – which is funny, but it’s actually true. 

“Two-thirds of species that have become extinct have become extinct because of meteor impact.” 

Mars could be a bolthole, a lifeboat to enable at least some of the human race to live on. Although reluctant to sell his plan on the destruction of humanity, Maxwell agrees Mars may be a necessary step to preserving humanity in the face of planetary threats such as meteors, global warming and population growth. 

“With the Earth’s burgeoning population, if we are truly to expand, we have to become a spacefaring civilisation rather than throttling ourselves to death here on Earth. Mars is the logical place to go,” Maxwell argues.

As the six test subjects of Mars500 emerged from their isolation on July 14 to blink in the glare of the media spotlight, they got a little of a taste of what it would be like for any future Mars explorers.

Andrew Smith – author of Moondust, for which he interviewed the remaining men who walked on the Moon and saw the sometimes-devastating impact the experience had on their lives – says today’s spacefarers couldn’t expect as easy a ride with the press as their Apollo forerunners. 

“There wouldn’t be the same innocence to it now,” he says. “I’ve a feeling it would be a bit like Big Brother for them.”

Smith says that having spoken to the Moonwalkers, it’s hard to imagine what kind of impact going to Mars would have on a person. But given that ESA is trying to answer some of those questions, it’s a safe assumption that sooner or later an intrepid team will take another small step and find out.

We will likely have to ride out the recession before we see any great proclamations of the kind of Kennedy’s famous speech – “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard” – but in Obama we have an orator who’s up to the job. 

For a significant number of scientists, the arguments are so strong that this can be only a temporary delay. As Crawford puts it: “In the long term I am quite convinced of the strength of the arguments. It will happen!”