Monday, May 13, 2013

Mars or Bust


 
Last week (May 6-8), George Washington University hosted the second annual "Humans2Mars" Summit.  Hundreds of scientists, astronauts, engineers and entrepreneurs gathered to discuss what it will take to get us to Mars. Manned space flight into the solar system has been dormant for decades - basically ever since the US beat the Soviets to the moon. Since then, no one seems to have had the energy, the imagination, or the resources to put together a program to get a human being beyond Earth orbit - not even to the moon.



The goal of the H2M conference was to address the major challenges that need to be overcome to send humans to Mars by 2030. Agenda topics included human and robotic precursor missions, science and engineering needed for the program, creating a viable space economy, agriculture and food production, biomedical challenges, international cooperation and other subjects. Among the many agenda topics were robotic and human precursor missions, launch systems, Mars transit challenges, space suit design, biomedical challenges, entry, descent and landing, in situ resource utilization, surface power, science goals, agriculture and food production, international cooperation, and creating a viable space economy. [Picture is from the NASA website. "This computer-generated view depicts part of Mars at the boundary between darkness and daylight, with an area including Gale Crater beginning to catch morning light."]



Well at least people are beginning to think about it. And it's not just limited to the H2M gang. The April issue of "The Atlantic Monthly" had an interview with Eric Anderson, the co-founder of Space Adventures and the head of two other companies including Planetary Resources, which plans to extract minerals from near-Earth asteroids. James Fallow's article was titled "Life on Mars". Anderson's vision is breath-taking: "In the next generation or two - say the next 30 to 60 years - there will be an irreversible human migration to a permanent space colony." He thinks the location of this permanent colony will be Mars and that it will grow within a hundred years from a few thousand people to a few million. Anderson considers economics to be the only real challenge - that technological and engineering solutions already are available. Mining the asteroids is the path he thinks will make the economics attractive.



Former astronaut Buzz Aldrin, one of the featured speakers at H2M, has devised a master plan for missions to Mars – the “Aldrin Mars Cycler” – a spacecraft transportation system with perpetual cycling orbits between Earth and Mars. Aldrin explains the concept in his new book, Mission to Mars. The cycler would require a "substantially large vehicle that would provide radiation shielding and spacious quarters in order to guarantee the safety and comfort of outbound-to-Mars and inbound-to-Earth astronaut crews." The Aldrin Cycler would travel around the sun, making close flybys of Earth and Mars - a trajectory that is continuously repeated every two and a half years with astronauts boarding and disembarking the cycler via a "small but speedy space taxi". Taking advantage of Newton's Laws of Motion, the Cycler could shuttle continuously "without requiring a significant amount of propellant to keep on track." [Photo is of Buzz Aldrin on his moonwalk.  Buzz was the second man on the moon as part of the Apollo 11 mission in July 1969.



Mission to Mars gives a comprehensive picture of the "Flexible Path architecture" for going to Mars. Flexible Path architecture combines a lunar strategy with near-Earth-asteroid-mining missions and uses the Martian moon Phobos as a way point to Mars. Aldrin suggests that "going to Mars means permanence on the planet. It cannot be run as a series of one-shot deals as were the moon landings - you know: fly there, plant a flag, take a picture and come home. Rather this will involve astronauts committing to "living out his or her life on the surface of Mars." As he points out: "Living far from Earth in a remote and confined will surely induce physiological and psychological stresses." Hmm, to say the least...it will also take a pioneering spirit beyond anything we have had on Earth during the Age of Exploration from the late fifteenth century on. Indeed the permanent residents of Mars will be homesteaders rather than explorers. In Aldrin's vision, they will employ in situ resource utilization to reduce the costs of resupply.



It's good that we dream these dreams. Without such, we will never move into the greater universe. But there is a practical side too - namely, the benefits Earth can derive from a permanent colony on Mars, which has, after all, a land mass equivalent to that of Earth.


(To be continued...)
 
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