Mars: It’s a Helluva Ride

Mars Exploration by Humans

Want to go to Mars? So do about 200,000 other people who responded to the first calls for Mars explorers by the Mars One team last year. It reminded me of S. R. Hadden in the movie Contact, showing Dr. Arroway his secretly built launch complex and asking her, “Wanna take a ride???”

In this case, a LOT of people wanna.  And, I don’t blame them. Mars is a new frontier, it represents a huge challenge, and there’s this romantic SF-ized idea that going to Mars will allow us a new start on a new planet. Not an unfamiliar concept to humanity: don’t like it where you are? Go somewhere else and colonize. That’s part of our history.

Make no mistake about it, however, going to Mars isn’t going to be a walk in the park. The applicants for the Mars One mission will be facing an entirely different kind of climate, gravity, and magnetic field environment on Mars from what they’re used to on Earth. Just the 210-day trip to get there once they leave Earth is going to be a psychological and physical challenge. They’re going to be in space, in weightlessness for much of that time, and then land on a planet that has gravity they’ll have to adapt to. Granted, it’s a lower gravitational pull than Earth’s, but it will still be a change.

The Mars One team has outlined a pretty ambitious time line for exploration that looks like we could have people on Mars in about 11 years from now. That’s very interesting, because I’ve been saying for a long time that the first Marsnauts will be our kids, or maybe our grandkids. That’s changed now. They could be our neighbors, our friends, ourselves. Before they leave on this one-way trip to Mars (and yes, it is one-way, for now), they will have trained for eight years to become proficient in living in the hostile conditions of the Red Planet. They’ll be ready to do whatever work they need to do on Mars to continue the explorations our rovers and mappers have begun for us over the past few decades. Mars is worthy of exploration, and in the long run, it may well prove to be a second home for humanity. The scientific payback could be huge, particularly in planetary science, where researchers will have at least two (three, if you count the Moon) sources of data about how rocky planets work, how they formed, how they evolve, and what ongoing processes change them.

The main points of the Mars One mission are familiar to most of us who have followed plans for taking people to the Red Planet over the years. Some years ago I was part of the original Mars Underground, a group of people who continued to plan Mars missions after NASA’s focus on human missions slewed to the Space Station and Shuttles. We had meetings every so often, and focused on such issues as timelines to Mars, practice runs on Earth and the Moon to train for Mars, propulsion systems, human health and medicine, the sociology of going to Mars, utilizing resources ON Mars to survive there, precursor missions to locate those resources (water, etc.) as well as appropriate places to land, and the psychological issues that could arise during such a mission. I see much of the same kind of enthusiasm and planning in the Mars One mission guidelines, and even more important — appropriate business decisions about how to fund such a mission. It’s not a single nation’s ride anymore. It’s multinational, something we knew back in the days of the Underground.

So, it’s all good. I like where Mars One is going. Maybe someday I’ll sign up (they do signups every so often to keep the astronaut pool replenished). For now, I’m following their progress with great interest. Very soon they’ll be building simulation habitats here on Earth to use in training the first crews. They have a business model in place, they’re partnering with organizations like Uwingu and others to raise funds, they’re inviting supporters to join and make community decisions about the eventual missions. They’re moving forward. I like that. I envy the first mission folk — they’ll have a helluva ride in front of them, and they’ll be paving the way for the rest of us who want to set foot on Mars in our lifetimes.