Travel to Mars: The Greatest Adventure of the 21st Century

Sometime in the 2030s, if NASA's plans come to fruition, the first human explorers will depart for Mars. It will be a voyage of discovery as challenging and, potentially, as dangerous as the circumnavigation voyages of Maglleon and Drake in the 16th Century.

The first expedition to Mars will have behind it the weight of almost ninety years of dreaming, planning and false starts, dating back from the first proposals by Wernher von Braun in the 1950s. Twice in living memory American policy planners have proposed humans to Mars programs and twice they have quickly collapsed under the fury of political opposition. The first time was in 1969, in the wake of the Apollo Moon landing, by a Presidential panel called the Space Task Group which proposed a Mars expedition as part of a program of post Apollo space exploration in the 1980s. The second time was twenty years later, in 1989, by then President George H. W. Bush, to take place by the end of the 2010s. Congress refused to fund either proposal.

The third proposal to send explorers to Mars was made in 2004 by President George W. Bush as part of a Vision for Space Exploration and, so far, it seems to have withstood the winds of political dispute. Indeed, ironically, some of the same politicians who put a stake in the proposal to go to Mars by George Bush Senior, like Senator Barbara Mikulski, are now enthusiastic supporters of President George Bush Jr.'s proposal to go to Mars. There are a couple of reasons for this.

First, in the wake of the Columbia accident, it has become clear to just about everybody, even at NASA, that the space shuttle era is drawing to a close sooner rather than later. Without the space shuttle fleet, something has to happen if the United States is to have any kind of a space program. A return by NASA to its exploration roots seems to fit the bill.

Second, a humans to Mars program will cost far less than supposed either in 1969 or 1989. For that we have to thank a gentleman named Dr. Robert Zubrin, who developed a plan called Mars Direct in the early 1990s. The main principle of Mars Direct involves manufacturing rocket fuel on Mars from Martian resources. Because of this one simple innovation, the space craft that will take people to Mars will not have to carry the fuel needed for the return trip to Earth, therefore greatly reducing its mass and size. NASA will not exactly replicate the details of Zubrin's Mars Direct proposal, but will almost certainly integrate key aspects of it into its own architecture.

What will an expedition to Mars look like? NASA's plans are thus far a little vague as, for the moment, it is concentrating on returning human explorers to the Moon. But certain things can be guessed at, based on hardware now under development and technologies that are being researched or will be researched.

The Mars ship will be assembled in Earth orbit using NASA's Ares V heavy lift rocket now under development for expeditions to the Moon. It will include some kind of high impulse propulsion unit, perhaps with nuclear thermal rockets, perhaps something more exotic such as Chang-Diaz's plasma rocket. This is considered crucial for cutting the time to voyage to Mars from many months to two or three months.

A habitation module will be included, perhaps based on an International Space Station module, perhaps based on the inflatable modules being developed by Bigelow Aerospace for its private space station. This is considered essential since, while astronauts can take the three day voyage to the Moon strapped in the cramped quarters of an Apollo or an Orion space craft, that arrangement is impossibly uncomfortable for a longer voyage to Mars.

There will be a Mars Lander that will take explorers to and from the Martian surface. A modified Orion space craft will take the explorers from Earth to the space craft and back.

The Mars ship may well have a bit of technology, now under development, that seems like something out of Star Trek This technology will be an electromagnetic shield designed to protect astronauts from cosmic background radiation and solar flares during their voyage from the Earth to Mars. This technology is now under development by the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire, Great Britain.
Before the first humans depart for Mars, an unmanned space craft will deliver a surface habitation module, along with the rocket fuel factory, as well as supplies and other equipment. Once it is determined that the rocket fuel needed to return to Earth has been produced and the launch window is present, the Mars ship will depart Earth orbit for Mars.

When the crew of six astronauts arrive on Mars, leaving their space craft in Mars orbit, they will spend several weeks or even months, depending on the mission timeline, exploring the vicinity of Mars near the habitation module, using techniques developed at the lunar base which had been established ten or so years before. They will collect rock and soil samples and then analyze them in a small lab included in the habitation module. Experiment packages, such as weather and seismology stations, will be set up to monitor conditions on Mars long after the human explorers depart.

Taking a cargo of rock and soil samples for further analysis on Earth, as well as the fuel manufactured on the Martian surface, the first human explorers will blast off from Mars, dock with their orbiting space craft, and then depart for Earth. They will be met with great adulation and will be compared to the explorers of the past, such as Columbus, Lewis and Clark, and Armstrong.

Subsequent expeditions will likely land at the original landing site, building up an infrastructure into what will amount to a Mars Base. Eventually people will live and work on Mars on a full time basis. But for what purpose? What would justify then expenditure of tens of billions of dollars?

NASA planners, when confronted with that question, always mention the search for extraterrestrial life. It's a compelling argument, especially for scientists. But life on Mars is very likely to be confined to microbes, which would, one suspect, be only of passing interest at best for most people who are not astrobiologists. Theres is also the question of when one decides that the search for life on Mars is fruitless, given the vast size of the planet. One could search for centuries and not be entirely sure that a Martian microbe is not lurking under the very next rock.

Dr. Robert Zubrin suggests a more compelling reason to go to Mars. It would be the same reason that the settlers went to Jamestown exactly four hundred years ago and Plymouth a few years after. We will go to Mars to settle the planet, to create a new branch of human civilization. Ultimately we will use our technology to terraform Mars, to make it into a New Earth, to make it habitable as it was billions of years ago, before its atmosphere leached away and its seas receded into desert. Beginning that process would be the greatest adventure of this century, eclipsing every human undertaking hitherto. It will ensure the long term survival of the human species and provide a frontier for the human imagination.

Surely a prospect worth just a little money.