Let's Go to Mars!

I was really into the space program when I was a kid. I knew the payloads and specs of every rocket and followed the plans of NASA and the Soviets like an avid sports fan. Back then the space program as exciting. There was a goal: man on the moon. And NASA was pushing the envelope to accomplish this feat with 1960s technology. Guys with slide rules and computers far less powerful than the one I am typing at now managed to get men to and from the moon several times and all within less than 20 years from initial space launch to final Apollo mission.

Then the Space Shuttle program came, and space exploration became about as exciting as watching planes at the airport. Nobody paid much attention to missions unless they blew up. The problem, as I see it, is that NASA has no big, challenging goal. Everything is 50 years out when, it is hoped, some technological breakthrough will make space travel safer and more affordable. Ho freaking hum. Call me when you’re going somewhere cool.

Of course, now I feel differently about having taxpayers subsidize my entertainment or even my perspective on the manifest necessity for humans to colonize space and bring life to the lifeless void.

Last night on one of the brainiac channels on the TV, there was a show titled “Mars Underground”. It was basically about the vision of an engineer form Martin to launch a manned mission to Mars with currently available technology. This guy shared my views about NASA and its recent tendency to over-engineer everything it touches and to defer anything spectacular to the remote future. The NASA Mars program involved a plethora of stages such as building an orbital rocket factory and a staging area on the Moon. The projected cost: 500 billion bucks or thereabouts. Meanwhile, the guys from Martin came up with a mission design that could be done within ten years and for a cost of only 55 billion dollars over a decade. We could have had men on Mars by 1999!

The idea is to send three unmanned spacecraft to Mars: a habitat, a launcher to get astronauts off of Mars complete with its own plant to make rocket fuel from the Martian atmosphere, and an orbiting spacecraft for the return to Earth. After these systems are tested, a manned craft, a second habitat, and a second launcher for a later mission would meet up with the prepositioned habitat and launcher. The astronauts would live on Mars for 18 months using Martian resources as much as possible to keep payloads down.

Some elegant aspects of the mission design are the use of payloads as shields against the radiation from solar flares (astronauts would sit solar storms out in a central buffered shelter) and the creation of artificial gravity en route by having the craft rotate in two parts on a tether.

The best part of the plan, in my view, is that it could be accomplished by private individuals with a commercial or academic interest in spacefaring. If you got to Mars and settled it, I reckon you would own it. I would invest in the settlement and terraforming of Mars or, if the technology becomes available, the refitting of humans to survive on Mars. How about it, Sir Richard?