Allow me to read to you an excerpt
from the lead editorial from the 1997 summer issue of Space Times Magazine
entitled, 'Let's go to Mars',
'Mars is waiting for us, a big, juicy planet with the possibility of
water and the possibility of life
out there looking beautiful and waiting for the humans to come and visit.
I think that it's a little strange that colonisation of Mars is such an obvious next step
in exploration of our universe
and we are not recognizing it.'
Yeah, I wrote that when I was seventeen years old.
I was, then, and still am
a bit of a Mars exploration junkie.
You are, after all, looking at a founding member of the Mars society
and one of the first websites that I created when I was in high school was called
Hank's guide to Mars exploration
Let's be honest, ever since man last set foot on the moon in 1972,
a manned mission to Mars has been the holy grail of space exploration.
It's been 40 years and I got more bad news for you because at best,
a manned mission to Mars is at least 20 more years away
and at worst and I mean this is the very worst,
it may not even happen within my lifetime.
Balls to that!
To better understand why such a potentially awesome thing isn't even in the planning stages right now,
let us examine the four biggest challenges we face for a manned mission to Mars
Number one: How to get there.
Number two: The risks involved.
Number three: The money and Number four: The why.
So Number 1: How do we get there?
To begin with, we need a new spacecraft and we need a new booster vehicle.
Now, it's important to note that these are two different things,
the booster gets you out of Earth and the spacecraft gets you from one place to another in space
In 2005, NASA's Constellation program was revised to allow for the creation of a new spacecraft,
using a plan to Orion
spacecraft, Altair lunar lander and Ares booster rockets modeled after the
successful Saturn V rockets that launched Apollo. The constellation
program aimed for 2019 returned to the moon
followed by a manned trip to Mars sometime after 2030, but then in 2010 the Obama
administration announced a new space flight program that had similar goals
but totally scrapped the moon thing. The new space launch system now being
designed calls for a new heavy-lift launch vehicle to be completed later
this decade that can be used for either crew or cargo. The SLS, which will someday
have a cooler named than that, actually uses engines designed for the space
shuttle combined with a liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propulsion system. For
manned missions, the SLS will carry the Orion multi-purpose crew vehicle which
can hold between two-four people and for cargo missions that will have a lift
capacity of up to 130 Metric tons. In announcing the project last year
president Obama said that the SLS would allow for missions to asteroids by 2025
and mars sometime in the 2030s. This is great and everything but it's not really a
plan.
The fact is nobody really knows exactly how the SLS would get us to Mars
or anywhere for that matter.
I recently got to talk to Mars Society founder Robert Zubrin who was one of my
heroes when I was in high school and wrote the amazing 1996 book 'The case for
Mars' and he pointed out that the lack of a defined goal for the SLS is a serious
problem. He added the Apollo program succeeded because the Saturn V
rockets were developed specifically to go to the moon. In our society is full of
really good ideas for how to get to Mars one of them called the Mars Direct
program calls for utilizing 2 Launch Windows that occur 26 months apart the
first lot would involve the unmanned Earth Return Vehicle, the ERV which would
land on Mars way before astronauts get there and basically set up on Mars, a
Rocket Fuel making facility, 26 months later the manned habitat would be launched
along with a second
ERV and the reason for that second ERV, basically as a backup. The second ERV
would go much slower than the manned crew vehicle so the crew would land make sure
that the first ERV was functional and if not they could call down the second ERV
which would land in their vicinity. Really don't want to arrive on Mars and
then find out that your ride home is totally busted.
More recently, Zubrin has promoted a similar strategy but this time using
vehicles that are created by the private firm SpaceX using a souped-up version of
a current SpaceX rocket called the Falcon Heavy, I just have to say here for
a second that they're way better at naming Rockets than NASA is. It uses the
conventional hydrogen oxygen booster and has a crew vehicle called the Dragon and
Zubrin for this strategy and visions three separate lunches. So, in this
scenario, the ride home stays in orbit around the red planet while the
astronauts work for a year and a half and then using an Ascent vehicle to
rendezvous with it and fly home. It sound a little bit complicated but Zubrin thinks
that using a private firm would drastically speed up the timeline for a
Mars mission. In fact, he thinks as soon as 2016, which seems a little optimistic
to me.
Challenge Number two: The human risks. So, even if we can get a good ship to get
astronauts to the red planet,
there are some you know, psychological and also some physical risks that these
people will be taking. Your number one and number two here are radiation and
isolation. The trip to Mars is about six months and also the trip back is about
six months and during those six months, astronauts will be
exposed to unhealthy amounts of radiation and once they get back we want them to
go with do parades and be national heroes, we do not want them to die of
cancer considering that some Apollo astronauts suffered cataracts because of
their very limited exposure during their 12-day mission. Protecting a Mars crew on a
mission that's 50 times longer than that turns out to be pretty tremendous
challenge. There are ways of course, to block radiation including thick pieces
of plastic and even water but those things are heavy and heavy is bad when
it comes to space flight because that means more fuel, more expense and less
chance that it's actually going to happen and the sun is a tricky beast,
sometimes it'll be you know pretty manageable background levels of
radiation but occasionally it shoots up these giant bursts of solar energy in
the form of solar flares. A large solar flare could kill a crew in a matter of
minutes.
At the very least, everybody knows that there's going to have to be at least
some small area of the crew cabin that will have really thick lead shielding in
the event of a solar flare,
but again lead is heavy. And then there are questions of how a crew would deal
with being in a confined environment for mission that is in all probability
longer than two years and also with the same few people for that long
I can't even have a roommate, can a crew of six men maintain their sanity and their
physical well-being on a really long isolated mission? The initial answer to
that question appears to be yes. In fact, an international crew in Russia just
finished a 520 day mission. During this 15 million dollar mission,
the crew of six men experienced conditions similar to what it would be
like to go to Mars, they even got to Mars and they were able to explore Mars which
was about the size of a tennis court and then they got back in and had to be
confined in their thing for another huge amount of time. We're making fun of this but
it's actually a really cool and useful experiment and huge amounts of data were
collected and are still being collected. The European Space Agency and the
Russian and Chinese government's are analyzing those data now which include
tons of information on the psychological and physical well-being of the people
involved. The six-men crew emerged from their mission pale from the lack of
sunlight but otherwise in good spirits after
going absolutely nowhere for a really long time. Our old friends at the Mars
Society have also been running a similar series of experiments for years now
they've just started the new Mars desert Research Station which isn't of all
places- Hanksville, Utah.
The goal here is not so much how to deal with isolation as it is to figure out
how to make the most of the mission and a harsh environment. I love the idea
and not just because it's a Hanksville, Utah, also because you know when we get
to Mars some day, we damn well better know how to make the most of it . Last
year alone, there were eight different mission crews from various universities
and space academies that rolled through the research station. These crews are
testing habitat designs, exploration strategies, figuring out what tools
astronauts are going to need on the Red Planet. Number three: The money, given the
worldwide economic climate coming up with the billions of dollars necessary
to send people to Mars turns out to be a bit of a challenge and that's before we
even get up in space and given that no official mission exist
yeah I'm not counting "We'll get there in the 2030's" as a plan. Cost estimates
for getting humans to Mars are hilariously all over the spectrum. From 20
million dollars - 400 billion dollars, it's futile to just say anything other
than it's going to be extremely expensive. For now we can look at ways to
potentially bring the cost down like international partnerships and dealing
with private firms like SpaceX. For example, Zubrin
noted to me that NASA's budgeting about 18 billion dollars for their space
launch system, but he thinks it can be done for less than 5. So just 5 billion
dollars and I probably got that lying around somewhere. And Number four: The Why.
One of the reasons why I joined the Mars Society as a young man was because I was
inspired by that optimism, the idea that people can get together and do something
really really huge. You know, it's possible to convince everyone in the
world that going to Mars is technically and physically and even financially
possible, but you can't convince everybody that it's something that we
should do. One of the best explanations for why we should do this is from the
Mars Society's founding declaration. I'm going to read that to you now, 'Civilizations,
like people, thrive on challenge and decay without it.
The time is past for human society to use war as a driving stress for
technological progress. As the world moves toward unity, we must join together,
not a mutual passivity, but in a common enterprise, facing outward to embrace a
greater and nobler challenge than that which we previously posed to each other.'
And now I'm going to let 17 year old Hank take us out with some lines from
that old editorial,
'Isn't it obvious that Mars is calling to our world,
it's a little bit too coincidental for me, almost like there is someone or
something out there giving us signs to go to Mars, we need to listen. We have the
technology, we have the people, we have the need for a manned mission to Mars, so
why can't we just do it? As it's over, that last sentence was in the editorial
written in all caps.
I can't say that I remain proud of my writing skills as a 17 year old, but I
can say that I remain proud of the kind of optimism and excitement that I had
and I still have, for this kind of enterprise. So, I guess, now all we need is
a plan. Thank you for watching this episode of SciShow. I hope that it was as
exciting for you as it was for me. We'll be on Twitter and Facebook answering
your questions and taking your suggestions and also of course, in the
YouTube comments below.
Goodbye.