Robert Zubrin wants to finance a flight to Mars with money from advertisers
By: John Tierney
Ha'aretz supplement 21.6.96/XNUMX/XNUMX
"The urge to travel far is human nature. Man naturally strives for fame, so he goes to dangerous places and buys him respect. Man is curious by nature, and driven by the desire to closely examine things he has heard about. And man is also driven by the lust for wealth, and looks for wealth wherever it is possible to get rich, according to the rumor" (from "The King's Appearance", a Scandinavian treatise from the 13th century)
Like many other dreams, it also happened to this dream: for generations, humans dreamed of traveling to other planets, but when they finally developed the appropriate technology, the realization hit them that, in fact, they didn't want to go there at all. A manned flight to Mars, the dream that financed generations of science fiction writers, lost its appeal soon after NASA formulated the route. The price - 400 billion dollars - seems absurd to a nation that has started to get bored with images of astronauts hovering around craters. After all, we already have enough rocks from extraterrestrial territories.
So how do you resurrect the old dream? Robert Zubrin, owner of "Pioneer Astronautics", a research and development company from Denver, Colorado, has an idea: man is driven by the desire for wealth. Why then not encourage private explorers, contemporary Vikings, to seek riches on Mars? Zubrin, who developed the technology needed for a simple and cheap flight to Mars, now travels the world lecturing passionately about the idea. He tells his listeners about the prizes offered by Portuguese and Spanish rulers in the 15th century to entrepreneurs, so that they would sail along the coast of Africa and cross the Atlantic Ocean; And he claims that if the United States government offers a "Mars prize" in the amount of 20 billion dollars - four times the cost of a private flight there, in his estimation - entrepreneurs will swallow the bait. If the entrepreneurs return safely from Mars - he says - they will make a handsome profit. If they fail, taxpayers will have to pay the price.
Either way, Zubrin believes, the "Mars Prize" will be a real bargain from the point of view of the public. Not only will it be cheaper than a NASA trip, but it will also yield a wonderful result: the discovery trips will return and be fascinating. Unlike the conservative bureaucracy of NASA, entrepreneurs will not be able to afford to bore the public with meticulous test flights, performed by certified technicians. They will be forced to take risks, risking their lives (or at least the lives of their employees) in one daring foray, in the manner of explorers of the past.
And since they financed the trip by selling rights to the media and broadcasting advertisements from sponsors, they will have to stimulate the public's imagination. They will not be able to fly to Mars solely to conduct scientific experiments and set a sign there with the names of politicians. They will have to make Mars a dangerous and romantic destination again.
This journey will therefore be a "multimedia package". Who will pack the package? People like Joel Rosenman, for example. Rosenman was among the organizers of the first Woodstock festival and its successor that took place not long ago. He also came up with various ventures - among them a competition in throwing gold coins that were thrown into the Caribbean Sea from a Spanish ship. With that kind of experience, he would surely have no trouble handling a commercial flight to Mars.
"Under NASA's leadership, space exploration was a heavy issue and almost not profitable at all," says Rosenman. "For a flight to Mars to bring profit, global awareness needs to be created. People should eat Martians, listen to Martian music, participate in Martian dance competitions, watch Martian TV shows. The passenger crew should share a famous personality - Harrison Ford would be perfect - or at least make the crew members celebrities. I would also set up a gambling site on the Internet where they would bet on everything - from the temperature in the spaceship to the first astronaut catching a cold."
He is not the only one who thinks so. The "Olympic Games", a three-week media event, currently brings in close to two billion dollars from television broadcasts and marketing deals; Properly packaged, the "Mars Showcase", which will last three years, may bring in much more. "A flight to Mars could captivate the largest number of viewers in history," says David Hill, president of Fox Sports. "The Olympics are just the Olympics - people run, jump, throw balls. Mars has captured the human imagination for thousands of years. This is the red star, the god of war.
Now is the next logical step in the enterprise of humanity. The team will be able to be seen in real time on television, flying in space and in constant danger of their lives - this is the biggest soap opera in the world."
A commercial flight to Mars may seem impractical and dishonorable, but the only reason for this is that NASA's existence has distorted our way of thinking. NASA itself is the anomaly in the history of the discovery of the world: it was not the bureaucrats who conquered the West and the Arabah. The commercial journey to Mars should therefore be compared to the discovery journeys of explorers from the beginning of the twentieth century. These explorers raced to the North Pole and the South Pole - areas that at the time seemed completely remote, extremely difficult and useless, just like Mars seems to us today. So forget about all those cautious flight planners who speak NASA jargon in the ears of astronauts who have been trained to restrain their emotions. We need explorers with vision and spirit, adventurers like... Amundsen and Skelton.
Indeed, from Roald Amundsen, the great polar explorer and the first person to reach the South Pole, Zubrin derives his Mars strategy. Before Amundsen set out on his journey across Arctic glaciers, in 1903 dozens of expeditions failed in their attempt to cross the Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. The British Navy, the NASA of the 19th century, sent more and more armored ships with dozens of sailors and tons of salt-cured meat, but they ran aground or were blocked by the ice, and when they ran out of food, their men had to retreat.
Norway, Amundsen's homeland, did not have a large navy. Amundsen had to finance his expedition himself. He spent his inheritance on a small old fishing boat and hired a crew of six sailors. "Amundsen's expedition was the smallest that ever attempted to cross the Northwest Passage," says Zubrin. "He didn't go to the Arctic with 300 tons of salted pork. The size of his ship, and his budget, did not allow this. Since the expedition was privately funded, it had to be - how do we define it? - A meat-free delegation." Therefore, Amundsen prepared himself for existence from what he would find in the field. And when his ship got stuck in the ice, exactly where British sailors perished, he and his men survived by using the techniques of the Inuit Eskimos. They built igloos, wore fur underwear and went out in dog sleds to hunt reindeer. The people ate enough and completed their journey across the Bering Strait.
The Amundsen approach, as Zubrin calls his Mars strategy, is not at all similar to the $400 billion "Betelstar Galactica" approach proposed by NASA engineers. According to this plan, which was prepared in 1989, the NASA ship is supposed to carry a load of fuel that will be enough for the round trip, and be so large that it will be necessary to assemble it on the space station, from parts that will be launched from Earth. Zubrin, on the other hand, prefers an expedition that is easy to load and that will subsist on what you find in the field - or more precisely, in the atmosphere. What is the "moose meat" that the atmosphere will provide? Carbon dioxide. According to Zubrin, the expedition will carry with it machines for converting carbon dioxide into liquid oxygen and methane - for returning to Earth and for operating the service vehicle in which the Martians will move in the field. And since their ship will not carry so much fuel on the way to Mars, it will be possible to launch it from Earth using rockets that have already been built and tested. On top of that - instead of NASA's spaceship, which weighs a thousand tons, Zubrin offers a pair of ships weighing 120 tons each. Instead of a thirty-year timetable, he believes he can get there in six years.
NASA was skeptical of this plan when it was presented to it six years ago by Zubrin and his colleague David Baker. But when it became clear that no budget would be found to fund its Mars program, the space agency changed its approach. She reviewed Zubrin's plan and allocated him $47 to build a prototype of the machine for converting carbon dioxide into rocket fuel.
NASA engineers concluded that Amundsen's approach was technically possible, and even designed their own version of Zubrin's plan, at a cost of $55 billion. Admittedly, this is a big improvement over $400 billion, but Zubrin believes that NASA could cut the budget to $30 billion if it settled for less equipment and more spartan living conditions on the Mars rover.
But the really big savings will be achieved precisely by bypassing NASA's bureaucracy. That's why Zubrin and others want to offer incentives to space entrepreneurs (a few weeks ago, a private foundation announced a ten million dollar prize for the first manned spaceship, which will take off under its own power, reach a height of one hundred kilometers above the earth and return and land safely, ready for another takeoff). Zubrin estimates that private explorers will be able to reach Mars at a low cost if they build a spacecraft from off-the-shelf equipment (such as the cheap Russian rocket engines), rent a launch pad and hire NASA as a subcontractor, which will perform several tasks, including tracking the spacecraft.
The entire mission, he estimates, will then cost five billion dollars. This amount is not large by NASA's standards - the "Apollo" program cost twenty times - but it is excessive from the point of view of private investors. To fund the implementation of Amundsen's approach, explorers would have to learn from another man: Ernest Shackleton, a charismatic English-Irish who was the Pole's greatest salesman.
On June 11, 1909, as his ship approached the port of Brindisi in Italy, Shackleton paced back and forth on the command bridge, deep in thought. He then returned to Europe from a failed and almost fatal expedition to the South Pole: poor planning forced him and his men to stop about 150 kilometers before the pole, and the exhausted crew, reaching exhaustion, sustained themselves with the help of cocaine. If Shackleton had worked for NASA, Congress and the media would have investigated him, and NASA officials would have advised him to remain silent. But since Skelton was independent, he eagerly prepared for the legions of European reporters who crowded the pier and searched for the right "punch word".
"Found!" He finally read: "Death was ahead and food behind, so I had to return."
He was a true pioneer: already in 1909 he was looking for the right word. Basically, Shackleton could not afford to say things that are not worth quoting: before leaving for Antarctica, he sold London newspapers the rights to publish the information and photographs from the trip, and at the expense of the future profits he would make from the media, he took out loans to finance the trip. On his return he hurried to write a book, which was immediately translated into nine languages. He also converted his ship into a museum and charged an entrance fee, and sold special postage stamps stamped from Antarctica. He went on a lecture tour that covered 30 thousand kilometers, and mesmerized his listeners with hair-raising stories. He knew how to take advantage of the new means of communication of those days, recorded a record and projected the first film shot in Antarctica. Other explorers/explorers had similar commercial acumen, but none of them reached Shackleton's ankles.
Shackleton learned a lesson that NASA has not yet learned: those eager to explore a place without its own value must create value themselves. It needs fascinating characters and drama - and NASA cannot take this risk again.
The space agency cannot do this because it must take all possible precautions: another disaster like the "Challenger" explosion could shut the door on the entire space program. In fact, the failure of a government research expedition is always considered a public scandal. In 1884, when members of the US Army expedition to the North Pole perished, the "New York Times" defined it as "a call to the entire nation". He demanded that the United States stop funding this "folly", and his ongoing criticism was among the factors in the administration's decision to stop exploring the North Pole. And by the way, this did not prevent the "Times" itself from proudly funding an expedition to the Pole twenty years later.
Indeed, sometimes the public is willing to put up with stupidity when it is privately funded. Shackleton's daring blunders in 1909 made him an international idol. His next expedition, stranded in Antarctica after icebergs crushed his ship, became an even more glorious failure - and was perhaps the most amazing survival story ever told (and, of course, also sold). The worst journeys made the best stories. Apollo 11 was a marvel of technical precision; The movie "Apollo 13" has so far brought in more than 337 million dollars worldwide.
Of course, no sane explorer would be interested in a disaster on the way to Mars. But whatever happens, those going to Mars should be gifted with Shackleton's sense of exploiting the media. While the trip to Mars may be more expensive than any trip to Antarctica in the past, today's global markets allow a far greater return for an explorer/explorer who knows how to package the trip in an attractive package.
The first travelers to Mars will arrive there in six months, explore the surface of the planet for two years and spend six months on the way back. In choosing these astronauts there is a natural temptation to consider the question: Who will have the best chance of getting through the three difficult years? But that is not the right question. It is suitable for NASA, not for a commercial trip to Mars.
In this case we have to ask: Who will have the best chance to captivate the viewers and readers in the three years of the arduous journey?
Fortunately, the market has already provided some answers. For example, in relation to the number of team members. Successful television series about isolated groups - "Gilligan's Island", "Star Trek" and "Lost in Space" - managed to survive for a long time with a crew of seven or eight people. If we can conclude from the success of the new TV series "The Third Rock from the Sun" - even the launch of one family has the potential of a sitcom, but it is still desirable that there are also bachelors in the team.
On the other hand, the commander of the flight to Mars must ignore the advice of Michael Collins, former astronaut and author of the book "The Flight to Mars" published in 1990. Collins advised to assemble a team of married couples. "An element of stability, of comfort inherent in an old shoe, lies in the ability of a husband to lean on his wife and vice versa," he wrote. "The atmosphere of a free and free club, saturated with sexual attraction, will surely spell disaster." disaster? On whom? Just look at the ratings of the series "Friends".
Each team member needs the skills of a researcher-explorer - physical strength, mental strength, technical resourcefulness, and also the charisma of an artist. To find the right candidates, and gain publicity, the delegation leader can organize televised competitions around the world and test the physical, intellectual and communication skills of the candidates. The candidates who reach the final stage will spend a winter of competitions in Antarctica, the environment most similar to Mars in terms of the frozen spaces and mountains. There they will live in a model of a Magoron of the type they will take with them to space and to Mars, and will perfect their skills as explorer-explorers and communications personnel.
"In designing the alcove, we drew inspiration from a box of canned tuna produced by 'Bumble Bee,'" says Zubrin. "It is a box that is about nine meters in diameter and about five meters high, and it is two-level. On the upper level are the astronauts' rooms, a laboratory, a gym, a kitchen and a food storage area that can also be used as a shelter from a solar flare storm. The lower level is a trunk, a workshop and a garage for the space vehicle that will be used for movement on the surface of Mars."
Whether during the journey in space or during the stay on Mars, the explorers will be constantly in front of the camera lenses that will transmit their activities live to the Earth, to prove to the public that this journey is indeed taking place. The Martian adventurers will not be able to return home and tell about places they never reached. They will have to earn their money fairly. But there will be
They, at least, have many opportunities to earn. Here are some of them:
* Sponsorship of a large corporation. "The Mars is an excellent basis for what is known in our profession as 'borrowed image'," says Jay Coleman, CEO of the marketing company AMC and an expert in promoting special events. "For the telecommunications company AT&T, for example, this is an excellent way to attach its brand to knowledge-rich technology and the future. When you see how a company like Coca-Cola spends 40 million dollars solely for the right to say that it sponsors the Olympic Games, and hundreds of millions of dollars more to broadcast this fact on television, one can assume that companies of its kind will pay a lot to be associated with Mars."
* Marketing partnerships. "I would do a marketing celebration in the clothing industry. I would create an entire line of 'The New Look of Mars' and sell the first pair of sneakers to walk on the planet," says Brandon Steiner, whose New York company is one of the leaders in the marketing of sports products. "There will also be a market of collectors - it will be possible to break a rock from Mars into tiny pieces and put each such piece in a glass box. I would die to see a spaceship flying with the Nike logo on it. And it goes without saying that a model of the spaceship will be a hit toy, and Mars will be a phenomenon in cartoon books for children. Those who act correctly will be able to earn perhaps a billion dollars a year from this space flight."
* Video games: Not only are these games very profitable (their revenue is greater than that of movies), but they also create celebrities. The first Martian game, which will be filmed during the training period of the explorers, will therefore be distributed in the market long before the launch itself. "Millions of kids will pay to play this game and start thinking of the astronauts as their friends," says Tom Zito, president of Digital Pictures, which incorporates actors from the Star Trek and Gulf Watch series into its popular sci-fi games. "Then, when they start showing the actual journey on TV, kids will be eager to follow along - especially if one of the astronauts looks like Cindy Crawford. The next step will be the creation of new games from clips taken during the journey itself, and the climax will be placing a robot with a camera on Mars. It will be possible to send commands to the robot from Earth and to explore the surface of the planet and look for caches, which will be buried by the astronauts. At the end of the game, a statuette of Elvis will be found."
* Name the peak. Wisely, Shackleton named geographic landmarks in Antarctica after his patrons. For $34, a 160 kilometer long glacier was named after William Beardmore. How much would Rupert Murdoch be willing to pay to have his name emblazoned on a 5,000 kilometer channel on Mars? And how much will a 30 kilometer high volcano, which will be called "Mount Gates" rise?
* Mars Online. Techies will pay to join the explorers in conference calls or monitor the stream of information sent to Earth, such as the data from the machine that converts carbon dioxide into methane. If the machine works well, the Rangers will have enough rocket fuel to return home. If not, technology enthusiasts will be able to follow the pulse of the astronauts.
*
Mars TV. "Television networks will not want to pay for access to the Mars flight at first," says Ab and Stein, the producer who developed the programs "Close Up" and "20/20" on the ABC network. "But after the public becomes interested in the flight and pays the cable networks to watch it, the big networks will change their approach. They will want the astronauts to broadcast a weekly news update - something like 'Live from Mars on Saturday night' - and also broadcast documentary videos from time to time."
But the most popular TV show may be the space version of "The Real World," the MTV documentary that follows a group of young narcissists living in the same apartment. To an outside viewer, the roommates' friction seems excruciatingly tedious, but this show has the highest ratings on MTV - a testament to the strange appeal of real soap operas.
"The flight to Mars provides us with a set worth five billion dollars to create drama," says Rosenman. "You can even give the team scripts, but with the right team the reality can be more fascinating than any script.
We can be captivated, for example, by the development of the relationship between Greg and Florence, who from the beginning is supposed to be Homer's girlfriend. After a dedicated group of addicts is formed, everyone will start to be interested in the fate of Greg, Florence and Homer and worry about them - will they be able to reach Mars and return from there."
This uncertainty in the journey to Mars will weigh on the financing, of course, as investors will shy away from a venture that could end at any moment. But if the investors examine the issue with a balanced long-term view, they will realize that even a complete failure - that is, the loss of all eight astronauts on the way to Mars - will not necessarily bring financial ruin. Like the expeditions that failed on the way to the North and South Poles, the Mars disaster will excite the public's imagination, sell books and movies and spawn sequels. The deadly glow of Mars will also produce new competitions: billionaires tired of mountain conquests and yachting championships will compete with each other to fly to Mars.
But to be commercially successful, says Rosenman, the flight to Mars must at least seem bigger than a sporting event. "It is impossible to routinely present this tremendous effort to reach another planet," he explains.
"If the public thinks that everything is done just for fun, the magic will disappear. A bigger reason than that is required - something Hollywood like 'the flight to Mars as the only way to divert an asteroid that threatens the Earth', or 'the flight to Mars as a way to find chemicals that may cure cancer'. As in the diving venture I organized in the Caribbean Sea, the initiator of the journey should ask: What will motivate people? What on Mars is similar to the gold coins dropped by the Spanish ship?" This is a difficult question. At first glance, Mars has no value. But Zubrin has a ready answer for that. His plan definitely includes gold coins.
One of the most famous passages in science fiction is the ending of "The Martian Diaries" by Ray Bradbury (1950). This book describes a family that escapes a beacon on Earth and arrives in their spaceship on Mars, which is uninhabited because previous human invaders have already exterminated its gentle alien culture The family therefore lands and exits the spaceship near a canal:
"I always wanted to see Martians," said Michael. "Where are they, father? You promised."
"Here they are," said the father, hoisting Michael on his shoulder and pointing straight down. The Martians were there. Timothy began to tremble. The Martians were there - in the canal - reflected in the water. Timothy and Michael and Robert and Mom and Dad.
For a long, long, silent period of time, the Martians looked back at them from the ripples of the water. The dream of conquering Mars, so popular for so long, today seems as anachronistic as the canals that previous generations of astronauts thought they saw on the surface of the planet. But Zubrin, as usual, has a new plan. He and Chris McKay, a space scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center, propose releasing chlorofluorocarbons into the Martian atmosphere.
They hypothesize that this gas will create an immediate greenhouse effect, warming the planet, melting its glaciers and thickening the atmosphere with carbon dioxide that will be released from the ice and the ground. Humans will then be able to roam the surface of the planet without pressure suits, and eventually also breathe the atmosphere of Mars.
"Relative to the technology available to us today, Mars is no more hostile to humans than the American continent was to Europeans in the 17th century,"XNUMX says Zubrin. "Admittedly, transportation is more expensive - in the past it was a member of the middle class
can finance his journey by selling his assets. But the costs will come down soon after someone makes the first journey. If an entrepreneur can convince a space research station to accept him as a protected tenant, he can start building a small settlement with his own greenhouse and add and develop."
To promote his theory, Zubrin likes to quote Frederick Jackson Turner's classic essay on the American book region. "To the credit of the book can be attributed the impressive characteristics of the American intellect," wrote Turner in 1893. "This stubborn American environment nourished creativity, because it offered an escape hatch from the shackles of the past." Zubrin sees only one area of the book that has the power to return and provide such an escape hatch. "Mars is remote enough to free the new colonists from the intellectual, legal and cultural control of the old world," he says. "It is rich enough in resources - water, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, metals - to give birth to a new world. A planet that is a place of refuge can bring enormous social benefit. He will refresh the culture of the earth with new ideas, as America refreshed Europe. In the history of mankind, dynamic, free societies existed only in the 400 years of expansion in the areas of the book in the West. Without a new book area, our culture is doomed to degeneration."
Mars as the new America, Mars as the only hope of civilization - here are some important gold coins, a glorious reason for any flight to Mars. And if it turns out in retrospect that the Mars-America analogy is incorrect? And if it is not possible to establish a colony on Mars in the next few hundred years? Even then the expedition will still serve a noble purpose. Future generations will enjoy a new saga of world discovery, perhaps more exciting than that of the Vikings, perhaps as good as Shackleton's.
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