Clark's Scribbles

The Martian Fantasy

The Martian Fantasy grows stronger. Manned Mars Missions are on the horizon. If you believe Elon Musk, human colonists will be headed up there in 2024.

Mars has been our neighbor practically forever. No Martian has ever complained about our behavior. But the Red Planet and its inhabitants have long figured in our dreams and nightmares.

War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells (1898)

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein (1961)

Total Recall (1990 movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger)

The Martian by Andy Weir (novel self-published in 2011; movie 2015)

We have spent hundreds of billions probing our neighbor. That investment has given us increased scientific knowledge and impressive technological developments. The Mars Rovers were an unexpected success. Projects aimed at colonizing Mars promise to produce more scientific knowledge and generate even more technology. The question for me is: Will the benefits justify the costs?

Investors are getting behind manned mission projects. Potential colonists are lining up to be the first settlers on Mars. It should be a great adventure like discovering America or conquering Mount Everest. Volunteers for the Mars missions hope to be like the astronauts who took us to the moon:

• Advancing scientific knowledge
• Developing new technology
• Expanding our frontiers
• Doing new and exciting stuff

There are some good reasons for leaving the invasion of Mars to science fiction writers. For example:

• A less risky exploration of the Martian surface using new generations of rovers would provide new technology and advance science at a lower cost.
• Our frontiers have already been expanded by successful space missions. Voyager sailed off into interstellar space in 2012 after visiting all of the planets in our solar system. Cassini spent 13 years studying Saturn, which is 6 times further from the sun than Mars. Exploring Mars would be like exploring your neighborhood lovers’ lane.
• The Apollo Project that put men on the moon is often cited as an example of what we could expect from a manned mission to Mars. But the moon is three days away while Mars is six months further out. That extra distance translates to more opportunities for things to go wrong. The radiation environment between here and Mars is worse than anything human travelers have ever had to cope with.
• The Apollo Project cost an estimated 288 billion in today’s dollars. Elon Musk has announced a trillion-dollar budget for his Mars colonization project. That is about four times what it cost us to put a man on the moon.
• Support for human-crewed space missions is lukewarm at best. There have been no human missions to the moon since Apollo 17 almost fifty years ago. President Bush attempted to restart the effort sixteen years ago. His goal was to return to the moon by 2020. President Obama killed that effort in 2009 and set the priority on a manned mission to Mars by 2030. At the beginning of 2020, the US cannot even put an astronaut on the International Space Station orbiting two hundred miles away.

NASA has reaffirmed its plan to launch a manned mission to Mars by 2030 (https://www.nasa.gov/topics/moon-to-mars/overview). SpaceX has published plans to launch colonists to the red planet beginning in 2024. (https://www.inverse.com/article/51291-spacex-here-s-the-timeline-for-getting-to-mars-and-starting-a-colony). The company’s CEO, Elon Musk envisions having a self-supporting colony with a population of one million by 2050.

An independent review of the NASA plan by the Space and Technology Policy Institute concluded that the goal could not be met.

The SpaceX plan is high risk at best. Musk’s Starship has not flown a single mission to date. The company plans to start using it to provide services such as ISS resupply missions and satellite launches starting next year. A launch window in late 2022 will be used to send two Starships to Mars with initial supplies. In 2021, before the first trip to the planet next door, a group of space tourists will be treated to a trip around the moon. Then assuming all of those missions have been successful, SpaceX will load up its Starships with one hundred passengers each and send them off to colonize Mars.

What if something goes wrong? The company’s Falcon rockets can be used as a backup if problems crop up during the commercial deliveries phase. Any problem on the lunar fly-by would almost certainly delay the Mars timeline. Failure of the 2022 mission to deliver supplies to Mars for the anticipated colonists would force a change in plans. Humans arriving on an alien planet for an extended visit will need those supplies to survive.

The SpaceX timeline shortchanges testing. An eighteen-month in orbit shakedown mission is needed to demonstrate that the Starship(s) are capable of making it to Mars and back.

Developing its payload delivery capabilities would allow SpaceX to prove its systems and gain experience while bringing in revenue. At least six Mars rover projects are planned for 2020 through 2024. One of those projects calls for bringing samples back to Earth from Mars. The company or companies that provide the spacecraft for those missions will gain invaluable experience that can be applied to establishing a human outpost on the red planet.

Retired Apollo astronaut Bill Anders, now in his eighties, does not see any imperative for manned missions. He doesn’t think there is enough public interest to support them. “He’s a ‘big supporter’ of the ‘remarkable’ unmanned programmes, ‘mainly because they’re much cheaper.’… he says the public support simply isn’t there to fund vastly more expensive human missions.” https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46364179

Mars has been orbiting alongside Earth for billions of years. There is no reason to believe that will change in the next hundred – or even the next thousand years. Postponing manned missions for twenty or fifty years poses no risk. We have nothing to lose by waiting until we are ready.

But robots continue to develop. If we wait long enough, the “humans” that colonize Mars will probably be made-in-Japan descendants of Kirobo and Actroid. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_robotics#Androids