Mars Is Just Too Inviting for Humans to Pass Up
Mars beckons humanity. Photographs taken from Mars orbit aboard unmanned Mariner and Viking spacecraft reveal dried-up river beds, huge volcanoes and grand canyons that “cry out for exploration,” in Carl Sagan’s words.
Earlier epochs on Mars appear to have been Earthlike, including an abundance of water on the surface. This suggests a tantalizing possibility of finding evidence of life, perhaps in the form of fossils. It has even been suggested that certain features on Mars resembling a huge face and pyramids could have been created by an intelligent civilization. Confirmation of that would revolutionize our understanding of our origins and role in the cosmos.
We need to go back and check all this out. How and when that is to be done is the question. One attractive concept is to send humans to Phobos or Deimos, the tiny moons of Mars.
The scientific and economic benefits of a manned Martian expedition are incalculable. Every two years the alignment of Earth and Mars gives us an opportunity to go to Phobos or Deimos for even less fuel cost than to our own moon’s surface. Because the moons have little gravity, the amount of fuel required to get there and back is only half that of a round trip to the Martian surface. The likelihood of significant quantities of water on the moons would allow a unique bootstrapping of resources, such as the ability to refuel spacecraft with oxygen and hydrogen.
Unmanned rovers and sample returns controlled by astronauts on Phobos or Deimos would provide millions of times more extensive data than would similar systems controlled from Earth, offering a far greater potential of finding signs of Martian life.
Studies sponsored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration suggest that manufacturing fuel and other products from extraterrestrial resources could open the way to an explosive space renaissance free of the Earth’s gravity bondage.
If these scientific and economic rationales are not enough, political events may decide how and when we go to Mars.
With the prospects of reviving the U.S.-Soviet agreement on cooperation in space, we see on the agenda such proposals as a joint unmanned mission to Mars and the potential for a joint manned mission by 2010. But 2010 may be too late.
The Soviets already are preparing an unmanned probe to Phobos in 1988, possibly as a precursor to a manned mission. The president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, Alexandri Alexandrov, has proposed a mission to Mars with a large cosmonaut crew during 1998-99.
Are the Soviets diverting us toward cooperating in the unmanned arena while they quickly build up to the far more exciting human mission to Mars before the turn of the millennium? Is NASA continuing to choke in “bureaucratic gridlock,” as former Apollo director Sam Phillips calls it? American space leaders and the President pay lip service to plenty of good ideas for our future in space, but there is no agreement, focus or political clout behind what they’re saying.
President Reagan has a historic opportunity to set as a national goal a human landing on one of the Martian moons and a return to Earth by the end of the century. We can either cooperate or compete with the Soviets.
If we can cooperate, in 1998 the two nations could launch separate spacecraft that would fly toward Mars alongside one another, each as an emergency backup for the other and as an opportunity for crew exchanges (like Apollo-Soyuz) during the tedious 22-month round-trip journey. The two nations might participate in a joint sortie from Phobos or Deimos to the Martian surface, using a small spacecraft similar to the Apollo lunar module, with one astronaut and one cosmonaut on board.
The return to Earth would occur in November, 1999, in time to celebrate the turning of the millennium and (let us hope) complete nuclear disarmament--a goal recently proposed by Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.
Mars 1999, as I call the concept, has several advantages over other missions. It would be less risky, could be done sooner and would be consistent with current NASA budgeting. Because of the low fuel consumption and the near-term availability of the necessary technology, engineers have estimated that the cost of the mission would be about $20 billion--less than half the cost of a direct trip to the Martian surface, and a tiny fraction of the cost of weapons programs like “Star Wars.” As a bonus, the 1998-99 launch opportunity includes a swing past the planet Venus.
We have sufficient time to develop the required technologies if we start now. Compared to a short eight years for the completion of Apollo from the time of setting the goal, we have 12 years to extend the human race’s reach to Mars.
