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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