Rendezvous with the Red Planet

Why go to Mars?

Once we reached the nearby moon, Mars instantly became the next logical step in manned space exploration. It’s closer than all the other planets in the solar system except Venus, and it’s the only one with an environment our astronauts could tolerate. (Venus has a hellish surface, with a toxic atmosphere and temperatures soaring to 700 degrees Fahrenheit.) Mars has a wispy atmosphere, surface ice, and, some scientists think, maybe even microbial life. “It’s a tangible frontier,” says Orlando Figueroa, who oversees NASA’s Mars exploration programs. “We know we can get to it.”

Why haven’t we?

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A manned mission to Mars presents the greatest engineering challenge in modern human history. At its closest, Mars is 35 million miles from Earth, or about 150 times farther away than the moon. Even at 18,000 miles per hour, a spaceship would take at least six months to reach Mars. Before returning to Earth, astronauts would have to wait on Mars at least 18 months for the two planets’ orbits to swing to alignment. During that time they would have to eat and breathe, and heat an enclosed, artificial habitat. In 1989, at President George H.W. Bush’s direction, NASA drew up a plan for conquering all these problems. It required a huge orbiting construction platform, a lunar base, and a 1,000-ton spaceship loaded with enough fuel and supplies to last more than two years. The cost was a staggering $450 billion—about 30 times NASA’s annual budget. That ended talk of going to Mars for quite some time.

Is the idea now dead?

No. NASA has a whole new approach, based on an idea by former Lockheed Martin engineer Robert Zubrin. Instead of taking everything with them, astronauts would use Mars’ own raw materials to manufacture the energy and fuel they need to survive and return to Earth. This would greatly reduce the cost of the mission. In the new plan, NASA would send two unmanned vehicles to Mars ahead of the astronauts. One would go into Martian orbit and serve as the return vehicle. The other would be the astronauts’ home on Mars. It would include a machine that could mix a supply of liquid hydrogen with the Martian atmosphere’s carbon dioxide to produce oxygen and water. The process would also yield methane and liquid oxygen to fuel the return trip. Only when these units were in place would six astronauts arrive on Mars. When they were ready to leave, they would hop into the fully fueled ascent vehicle, link up with the return vehicle, and go home. The estimated cost is $20 billion to $50 billion.

Would this plan work?

Major logistical problems remain. NASA has yet to overcome the potentially devastating physical effects that a Mars mission would wreak on humans. During their months streaking across deep space, the astronauts and their ship would be exposed to cosmic rays and “solar wind”—high-intensity radiation that would easily penetrate any conventional spaceship. The bombardment of neutrinos and other particles could damage DNA, cause cancer, and impair the central nervous system. Shielding people and equipment against this onslaught isn’t easy or cheap. Encasing the ship in radiation-absorbing materials like lithium hydride could add $30 billion to the mission budget, NASA says. Other materials, like the polyethylene that cloaks the International Space Station, would be needed in such quantities that they would add crippling weight to the ship during liftoff.

Are there other obstacles?

Prolonged weightlessness, for one. To keep the astronauts’ muscles and bones from wasting away on the long mission, NASA will have to come up with a weight-bearing exercise device more sophisticated than the stationary bike now used on the International Space Station. Prolonged isolation presents another huge challenge. It could lead to claustrophobia, anxiety, and even severe personal friction. The six astronauts must endure a six-month journey to Mars cooped up in a small ship, and then 18 months on the planet in a cramped surface habitat. Although NASA envisions it as a five-story structure, it would be perhaps only a couple of dozen feet wide. Jammed in such a space amid body odors, recycled air, and canned mush for food, even the most hardened space travelers could get on one another��s nerves. There is also the matter of sex, or lack thereof. Michael Collins, who served on Apollo 11, thinks that only married couples should go to Mars. “An element of stability, of old-shoe comfort, would be introduced by having one’s husband or wife to fall back on,” he wrote in Mission to Mars. “Certainly a singles-bar atmosphere, a charged mixture of sexually unattached competitors, would be a disaster.”

So is a Mars mission really feasible?

Right now, no. But NASA says it believes it can overcome the remaining technical obstacles. “If we decide to do it, it could be done in 10 and certainly no more than 20 years,” says NASA chief Dan Goldin. The agency is waiting for a mandate from government, like that given by President Kennedy for a moon landing. “It’s going to take a president of the United States that’s going to say that this is going to be a priority,” said Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida earlier this year. “Otherwise it’s not going to happen.”

Mars’ future, and ours