when will it happen? no one knows Before 2050? To this Gary Martin is ready to answer in the affirmative and adds: "This will not be one flight to raise a flag and return home. After we fly to Mars for the first time, we will fly there frequently"
Gary Martin has a dream job. He is the architect of the US space program. His role is to try and look ahead, where it will be possible to reach in ten, twenty, thirty years and maybe even more. So what will happen? The furthest that can be predicted with high probability, according to him, is a manned flight to Mars. when will it happen? no one knows Before 2050? To this, Martin is ready to answer in the affirmative and adds: "This will not be one flight to raise a flag and return home. After we fly to Mars for the first time, we will fly there with high frequency."
And what will happen in a hundred years? There is only a slim chance that Martin will then be alive to confront his predictions, but he holds an official position and does not want to be seen as prophesying. On second thought, he is ready to reveal that he believes that in a hundred years, humans will establish colonies on Mars. It is possible that humanity will even create a new civilization there.
Yes, he believes that there is a good chance of the lure of space tourism. Maybe even tourism to the moon. It is not certain that tourists will be able to fly to Mars. Even in a hundred years it will be a complicated and expensive operation. It is very possible that there will be manned flights to the moons of Jupiter, where there are also conditions for the formation of life. "I would be happy to live in a hundred years to see if these things will actually come true," he says.
Is it possible to expect the departure of a person outside the solar system? "There are many mysteries in physics that we must solve before we leave the solar system," he says. "I think we will send robots there to learn more about what is happening there. But there are enough new things to learn within the solar system itself."
However, he believes we can see much deeper into the universe. Huge telescopes will be sent into space that will operate at a very high altitude, using revolutionary technologies. The first telescope already has a name, "James and Web", and it will be sent into space in ten years. A giant telescope may also be placed on the moon. These will allow us to locate signs of ancient light, and thus look back in time and get closer to the days of the Big Bang, 13.5 billion years ago. They will reveal, perhaps, the secrets of the formation of the universe. Besides that, they will make it possible to discover planets outside the solar system and check if there is life on them, even if we can't fly there soon.
Martin, 49 years old, pleasant in his ways and soft-spoken, was appointed four years ago to head the team tasked with examining the long-term plans at the American space agency NASA. He says that the team's work has so far been done in a very low profile. The plan at NASA was to concentrate on the space station project, but the agency felt the need to also test ideas for a much longer range. He got lucky and got the job.
A base on the moon
Martin lives in Richmond, Virginia. He studied anthropology in college in Colorado and in the XNUMXs he was trained in archeology and carried out surveys in areas intended for construction, until cutbacks in the field forced him to abandon the profession. A friend promised him a job on the Star Wars project if he studied physics. He did so, and was later hired by NASA. There was a time when he wanted to be an astronaut, but vision problems disqualified him outright. Now he says that he has not abandoned his dream of visiting space, and he hopes that one day he will be able to realize it, even if only as a tourist.
In the meantime, he can wander in his imagination wherever he wants, and he even gets paid for it. As a child he read a lot of science fiction, and even today he loves it. The books he read predicted a great deal of what he thought would happen in space, although the writers allowed themselves shortcuts when they encountered difficult problems in the field of physics. Everything goes there too safely. In reality it is different. "The journey to Mars is much more difficult than they thought in the fifties," he says. "They thought then that it would be possible to send people to Mars within thirty to fifty years. Today we understand that this is a much more complex task."
A flight to Mars, he explains, will require the construction of a launch base on the moon. From there the spacecraft will be sent to Mars and other planets. What is better than the moon? The main problem in launching spacecraft from Earth is its great gravity. Large amounts of fuel are needed just to get out of here, and then there isn't enough fuel left for a long flight in space. The moon's gravity is much smaller, one-sixth that of the Earth, and launching from there would allow a great saving of energy.
The moon will actually become, according to Martin's vision, a place teeming with life. From the base on the moon, scientists will try to find minerals in its soil that will make it possible to create fuel for spaceships that will be launched to Mars and other destinations, thus avoiding the need to fly the fuel specifically to the moon. It may be, he says, that there is hydrogen on the dark side of the moon, and we may be able to extract fuel from it for spaceships. It may be possible to extract water and oxygen. All of these will facilitate the desired launch to Mars.
NASA already has a timetable for the operation to reconquer the moon. An unmanned spacecraft will be sent in 2008. A manned spacecraft will be sent no later than 2014. From then until 2020, a series of flights to the moon will be operated to establish the base. Now they are starting to work on the plan to build the new space vehicle, which will fly five to seven astronauts and allow multiple flights in the Earth-Moon line.
Why is it so complicated to fly to the moon? After all, we already did it.
"There is still a great deal to learn about the moon. We were on the moon more than thirty years ago, and since then we have been flying at very low altitudes around the Earth. The younger generation of NASA does not have the necessary experience to build a suitable spacecraft and also to fly to the moon."
Today, NASA needs the experience of the veterans, those who served in the Apollo program. This is why the space agency is now rehiring its retirees, on a consultant basis. "However", emphasizes Martin, "today we know that in the Apollo program they took great risks, without being aware of it, things that today we cannot afford. For example, we know a lot more about radiation than we did then. A very common material we used was aluminum. The problem is that when radiation damages aluminum, it can have serious biological consequences for humans."
starting from the beginning
NASA has to start almost from scratch, it becomes clear from Martin's words. "Today we do not have systems that are suitable for flying to distant planets and staying on them. This includes spaceships, instruments and even spacesuits. We will have to build all of these, and test them on the moon, where the conditions are more similar to Mars than the conditions on Earth. The prolonged stay on the moon will allow scientists to learn about the way humans will deal with life on Mars."
The renewed focus on the moon may also bring new discoveries about it. The flight to the moon can provide important information, for example, about the first billion years of the earth. Scientists estimate that the moon was formed from the collision of a star the size of Mars with the Earth (the diameter of Mars is about half the diameter of the Earth). Since then the earth has undergone great geological changes. The moon, however, remained more or less the same. Its geology can reveal many secrets to us about the ancient Earth. The spacecraft of the Apollo program did indeed bring rocks from the moon to Earth, but it was a very small amount. There is much more to explore on the moon.
It would certainly be possible to shorten the way to Mars if we flew straight there, says Martin. There is even an argument that if the plan to fly to Mars via the moon is realized, it will ultimately be much more expensive than a direct flight, and this intermediate destination will even divert attention from the real destination, Mars. But Martin claims that in planning a direct flight to Mars the chance of failure is much greater.
"It is true that we sent robots to Mars and it was a very successful mission," he says. "But sending a person to Mars is already a much more complex and expensive business, especially if you want to ensure the safety of the astronauts. Until the manned expedition leaves for Mars, NASA will continue to send robots there, probably at a rate of once every two years, to try to learn more and more details about it before the manned mission."
Martin says that there will be a difference between the organization of the flight to the moon in the past, and the flight to Mars in the future. It should be taken into account that the flight to Mars is very long: about a year and a half in each direction (the distance between the Earth and the Moon is 385 thousand km, while the Earth and Mars are separated by 55.7 million km, when the orbits of the two planets bring them to maximum proximity). In the past, almost all decisions were made on the ground, by teams of hundreds of people, and not by the astronauts in the spacecraft. The new model of the future spaceship will be very similar to a submarine, with the captain making a lot of decisions himself. The crew members will be required to repair faults on the way themselves.
Two spacecraft have already been landed on Mars. What is actually the biggest challenge in landing a man on Mars?
Martin: "The first challenge is to leave the planet safely and efficiently. A second critical problem is the human body's dealing with the radiation in space, and with the weightlessness and its effect on the human body. Beyond that, there are 'small' problems that we will have to deal with, for example, building small and efficient systems that can be repaired in space, or producing food for long periods of time."
hundreds of billions
Scientists estimate that Mars is the most suitable place for extraterrestrial life, although it is much colder (temperatures in the summer, in its subtropical region, range from minus 89 degrees before sunrise to minus 12 degrees at noon). It has a thin atmosphere that provides protection from cosmic radiation and striking meteorites. It is very possible that it contains water, carbon dioxide and various minerals. "It wouldn't surprise us if we found life on Mars, maybe underground," says Martin.
If anyone thinks that the idea of a manned flight to Mars is just an intellectual exercise combining reality and imagination in the fevered mind of Gary Martin, or a PR exercise by NASA to attract budgets, they are wrong. The White House recently approved the plan. Although not everyone takes every decision of President George Bush seriously, NASA is already starting to organize for implementation.
Almost every president in the last fifty years wanted to be remembered as someone who made a significant contribution to the exploration of the universe. In January 1972, President Richard Nixon, at a time when NASA's budgets were being cut, stood behind a plan to build a new series of spacecraft that would be reliable and cheap. This is how the space shuttles that still operate today were started. But this plan turned out to be very expensive in retrospect, not only in money but also in human lives, after two ferries crashed.
In 1984, Ronald Reagan decided on the establishment of the International Space Station with a budget of 8 billion dollars for 16 years. Twenty years have passed since then and the construction of the station has not yet been completed, and it will eventually cost something between 30 billion and 100 billion dollars. In 2010, with the completion of work on the space station, the current space shuttles were taken out of service. "The space station is a wonderful achievement," says Martin. "This is a place where medical and other experiments on life in space are carried out. It's an operation that better prepares us to deal with the difficulty of living in space."
The idea of a flight to Mars was practiced even in the days of George Bush Sr., and even then included the establishment of a landing base on the moon. The plan was to carry out the flight in 2019 and the cost according to the calculation was 400 billion dollars. Due to budget problems, the program was finally suspended. Now President Bush Jr. wants to revive his father's plan, with updates. He does this half a year before the presidential elections, and his opponents claim that the whole thing is nothing more than a PR exercise.
Bush therefore wants to show that this is a serious plan. He appointed a committee of experts, which determined that the idea was practical, but also recommended sweeping changes in NASA's organizational structure, which would adapt it to the new goal. She also recommended privatizing part of the space program. The result is that NASA is now playing a game of musical chairs, with every second employee, junior or senior, changing positions or about to be replaced. Martin's future is also not clear at all.
The president decided to allocate one billion dollars to implement the plan in each of the next five years. In addition, during this period, an additional 11 billion dollars will be transferred from NASA's regular budgets to finance this project. This of course requires a change of priorities at the space agency. One of the victims is the Hubble Space Telescope project. NASA decided to stop maintaining it, for safety reasons. The practical meaning is the death of the telescope within a few years. The scientific community, which sees the telescope as one of the most important sources of information ever about space, reacted angrily to the decision.
A one-way ticket
One of the crucial questions regarding the future of the Mars flight program is of course the price. How much will it cost? "It's very hard to tell," says Martin. "We flew to the moon and we can make comparisons with what happened twenty years ago. We haven't flown to Mars yet." What is certain is that the flight to Mars will eventually cost much more than the amount planned in the days of Bush Sr., 400 billion dollars.
Isn't this a waste of money that could have fed all the world's hungry? Martin and his friends are used to answering this question. "It is important for us as humans to explore the world around us," he says. "It is the nature of humanity, the curiosity to learn and explore new worlds. It is something inherent in each of us, in every baby. If we discover life in other worlds, it will completely change the way we see ourselves, and our way of thinking."
The space program, he emphasizes, has consequences in other areas as well. "In the days of the Apollo missions to the moon, there was a large increase in the number of young people enrolled in science studies. Meanwhile, over the years, fewer and fewer young people are going to study science and mathematics. The majority want to go and do business, but if we offer them something exciting, I believe that more and more young people will want to try and break new boundaries, in science in general and not just in space."
Martin mentions another, very practical advantage. "We must not forget that the money invested in the space programs is not found in space but on Earth. All this money goes to the local economy. This is a good way to create jobs and with this money people buy apartments, go to cinemas and eat in restaurants. It's a proven industry. It's an optimistic industry. When you invest in space, you are actually investing in high-tech. And there are also economic reasons to fly to other planets: you might be able to find important resources and minerals on them that will revolutionize the global economy."
Martin thinks the program to launch a man into space should be an integrated international effort. "This should not be a task only for the United States", he says. "Preparing the flight to Mars is not the work of a few engineers sitting at a drawing table. Such a task requires the best and most creative people, and these should be sought all over the world. I believe that the plan to land a man on Mars will ignite a feeling of unity in humanity, and when the day comes when we reach Mars, the whole world will be able to feel together."
There is a claim that you can actually learn a lot about the solar system and the universe if we send robots instead of humans, and that way a lot of money will be saved.
"If your goal is scientific discoveries, then true. Robots can do the job very well. But space exploration is not only a science, but a human experience. Man has always dreamed of traveling as far as possible. The goal was not just scientific research, but experimentation. See through his own eyes and not through the eyes of the robot."
Prof. Paul Davis, a philosopher from the Center for Astrobiology in Australia, claims in an article he published in the "New York Times" that the high price of sending a man to Mars could torpedo the entire plan. A one-way flight would significantly cut the necessary expense, but for that the astronauts would have to volunteer for a mission from which they would not return to Earth. Such a truncated program can be carried out in a much smaller number of years. Davis is convinced that there will be no shortage of volunteers.
Flying astronauts in one direction, Davis clarifies, does not guarantee their quick death. The conditions on Mars will allow, with suitable equipment, human existence for several years, perhaps until a cheap way is found to extract them from there. Four astronauts with a small nuclear reactor and several vehicles of this type that have already been placed on Mars will be able to produce the oxygen they need, and even grow or produce food.
There is no doubt, it will not be comfortable to live there, the conditions will be difficult, but they will be able to exist. At a reasonable price it would be possible to send them supplies from Earth. There are, of course, risks: essential devices may break down; Mars' weak gravity increases the risk of cosmic radiation causing cancer. But Davis is convinced that won't stop people from setting out on a mission.
Martin does not take the offer seriously. NASA, he says, does not entertain such an idea at all. It seems to him an immoral idea. "We cannot send people into space without doing everything we can to ensure that they return home safely."
