Robert Zubrin has a grand plan to turn the fourth planet into humanity's new frontier - within the next 10 years! Welcome to hell on, um, Mars.
For a place with an average temperature of -81 degrees Fahrenheit, Mars is red-hot these days. In April, NASA launched the Mars Odyssey spacecraft, which by October is expected to be in orbit around the Red Planet, mapping its surface, hunting for water deposits, and measuring radiation levels. NASA plans to send two rovers to Mars in 2003, and nearly a dozen orbiters and landers are scheduled to follow over the next two decades, launched by American, European, and Asian space agencies.
There's even some Mars action taking place here on Earth. This summer, 25 researchers are spending a total of eight weeks at an exploration base on Devon Island in Canada's Northwest Territories, attempting to simulate what it would be like to live and work on Mars. The Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station is a $1 million outpost built on a chilly, meteor-blasted patch of polar desert that was chosen for its somewhat Mars-like conditions. The research team will live in a two-level, 27-foot-wide fiberglass cylinder, studying the strategies, technologies, and hardware designs humans would need to explore and settle Mars. The 19-man, 6-woman crew includes seven engineers, four geologists, three physicists, two physicians, two biologists, and, naturally, a full-time Internet guy. You'll be able to follow their progress on the Discovery Channel, which forked over about $200,000 for exclusive broadcast rights to the project. Flashline.com, a software-component maker, kicked in $175,000 to have its name plastered on the research facility. Plans are in the works to build three additional research stations, in the American Southwest, Iceland, and Australia.
The arctic station is the pet project of the Mars Society, a group founded in 1998 by Robert Zubrin, a former Lockheed Martin space engineer who now runs the Lakewood, Colorado-based R&D firm Pioneer Astronautics, which contracts with NASA. The society has about 4,000 members and is somewhat like a model rocket club without the rockets. Zubrin is an evangelical crusader who believes that it is mankind's destiny to land a human on Mars within 10 years, with or without government funding. Following that, he expects waves of explorers to colonize and terraform the Red Planet within a few generations.
To some, the Zubrin plan is downright visionary; to others, it's the work of a crank. "Frankly, I think this is going nowhere," says physicist Robert Park, director of the Washington, DC, office of the American Physical Society and author of Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud, a book that criticizes Zubrin's scheme as simplistic and unworkable. "These Mars Society guys are fooling themselves about their plan and trying to fool others. I can't imagine why they think people would be willing to pay taxes to support a colony that returns nothing. Pick the worst place you can think of on Earth, and it's a Garden of Eden compared with Mars."
Park says Zubrin threatened legal action over passages in his book. He agreed to several changes, including the removal of a sentence that described Zubrin as "messianic."
But Zubrin has plenty of fans - even some professional skeptics have a soft spot for him. "I don't think Zubrin's a nut, and I study nuts for a living," says Michael Shermer, editor in chief of Skeptic magazine, who generally supports the Mars Society plan. "He's a zealot, but you have to be in that job. The key to good science is striking a balance between being open-minded and being conscientious, and I think Zubrin does that."
Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the best-selling sci-fi series Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars and a member of the Mars Society board of directors, questions whether the group can pull off such an ambitious project, and is troubled by its seeming rush to colonize Mars. But there's also a lot he likes about the Mars Society scheme.
"I love the Devon Island project," says Robinson. "I'm planning to go there next summer as an observer. It shows you what we could do on Mars, and starts doing it right here on Earth. I think it's helped take the Mars Society from being a fringe unit to being a group that has a beautiful and important project."
It's hard not to get swept up in the romance of setting foot on the Red Planet. If Val Kilmer can go there, why the hell can't we? The Mars Society taps into the spirit of adventure shared by humans through the ages, and the group's knack for raising public awareness about Mars may be its single biggest contribution.
But Mars isn't a movie set. It's a real place, full of known and unknown dangers. There are good reasons why NASA will first send a series of bots to find out more about the planet before proceeding with a human mission. An incremental approach to exploring Mars isn't as fun as Zubrin's plan, but it makes more sense. It'll give us a better chance of protecting humans from Mars' hostile environment - and perhaps more important, protecting Mars from humans.
Destination Mars: Are We Funded Yet?
Zubrin's plan, dubbed Mars Direct, draws on current technology (sorta) to get to Mars within a decade (kinda) at a cost of only $30 billion (maybe). The price tag is only the most obvious red flag. NASA's own estimates of a manned mission to Mars have come in as high as $450 billion, and even allowing for the sort of bloat that has made the aerospace industry rich, that's a big difference. But hey, this isn't rocket science - it's rocket science funding.
Folks at the Mars Society know that the government isn't likely to pay for a manned mission to Mars anytime soon. So, many in the group favor a people's mission to Mars, funded by a wealthy benefactor (attention, Bill Gates!) or perhaps a media company (in exchange for broadcast rights), or maybe even by ordinary citizens.
"There are hundreds of millions of people who think it's vital to our future that humanity expand into space," says Zubrin. "Well, gee, at $100 each, that's tens of billions of dollars."
Others have suggested that private industry will step up with the cash, seeing the Red Planet as a ground-floor investment opportunity. But what does Mars have that a corporation could possibly want?
"When the Space Station was first proposed, people said private industry was going to be putting up the money because the mission would provide all sorts of high tech doodads," says Park. "But industry wasn't interested. They were delighted to take taxpayer money to build these things, but they weren't interested in investing in them."
Zubrin has an unwavering belief that we can get to Mars in 10 years. It has a nice JFK ring to it: We can land a human on Mars within a decade. But he's been saying 10 years since 1996, when he published his book, The Case for Mars. Some folks wonder what the rush is.
"I'm not in a hurry to get to Mars like a lot of the Mars Society people," says Robinson. "I don't have this apocalyptic sense that we need to do it in 10 years or a window will close. I think that's crap. If there's a window that's going to close in 10 years, then our civilization is too stupid to deserve something like this, anyway."
Assuming Zubrin somehow comes up with the money, and locks in a real mission window, what technology does Mars Direct need to get there?
The Marsnauts might consider using a big chemical rocket. But chemical reactions are too slow and feeble to propel spacecraft long distances, and these rockets are expensive, since they have to heave their own enormous fuel-weight. A big-time plasma rocket (see "Zip Drive," Wired 9.01, page 96) or a spacecraft equipped with a fusion reactor is a better alternative, but each is still years away.
Zubrin isn't discouraged. He firmly believes that safe, cheap, fusion-reactor rockets will be invented soon. Who knows? Maybe even within 10 years.
The next step for Mars Direct is to launch an unmanned craft that can return from the planet. The return ship will have a nuclear-powered chemical factory on board that will suck carbon dioxide out of the Martian air and produce methane rocket fuel, oxygen, and water. It'll make its own fuel right there on the surface of Mars, the ultimate home-brew rocket project.
Once this fuel factory is established, a backup system will be dropped a few hundred miles away. When the backup is up and running, only then does Mars Direct commence countdown on the first manned flight.
Six Months of Radiation, Muscle Atrophy, and Spew!
Lift off, and you're finally on your way! Better settle in, because it's a long ride. The trip to Mars will take six months, covering 400 million kilometers of space - about 1,000 times farther than the Apollo astronauts traveled to get to the moon.
By astronaut standards, you're living large: The 25-metric-ton spacecraft that Zubrin envisions is roomy, equivalent to a two-story house. If you were stuck inside a standard Apollo-era capsule, you'd be cooked from radiation during the trip. But since you're surrounded by three years' worth of K rations and Tang, you barely get a sunburn!
Actually, the deep-space radiation problem isn't so easily explained away, despite the best efforts of the Mars Society. Cosmic radiation consists mostly of high-speed iron particles, which deeply penetrate the body. These rays could cause fatal breaks in an astronaut's DNA, as well as trigger deadly mutations in the bacteria found within both the body and the spaceship. For many critics of the Mars Direct plan, cosmic radiation is a deal-breaker.
"The radiation issue is not the only problem, but it's the most serious one," says Park. "Once you're outside Earth's magnetosphere and you get the unscreened cosmic and solar radiation, it's a very different environment. We have surprisingly little evidence of what that kind of radiation does to you. These particles are much more energetic than any of the particles we encounter. If they do something, it's going to be pretty awful."
Zubrin calls such radiation concerns "scare-mongering," and many Mars Society members consider the issue a paper tiger.
"I've studied the radiation risk, and it's vastly overestimated," says Gregory Benford, a member of the Mars Society board, a professor of plasma physics and astrophysics at UC Irvine, and author of the novel The Martian Race. "A six-month trip to Mars, a year or so on the surface, and a six-month return would increase the risk of cancer by only about 5 percent. Smoking cigarettes increases your risk by several hundred percent."
Benford says there are ways to protect the Marsnauts from most radiation they'd encounter. "You use water in the outer walls of the habitat on the way to Mars; that takes out a lot of the radiation," he says. "And the first thing you do when you get to Mars and you have a habitat on the surface is bag up sand and put it on the roof. So I don't think the radiation risk is a deal-breaker by any means."
No one knows for sure if adding water to the outer walls of a spacecraft will sufficiently reduce radiation. But it will add a lot more weight to the craft, and in space travel, weight is money. So Zubrin may have to add a few zeroes to his cost estimate.
Besides radiation, there are other health issues for a Mars journey. The first medical problems that can crop up - nausea and acute vertigo caused by weightlessness - would hit astronauts as soon as they leave Earth's gravitational pull. Antinausea medication controls, but doesn't solve, the ailments. During the first few days of flight, even a sudden turn of the head can be enough to trigger an in-cabin spew.
But a more troubling hazard lies in the weeks and months ahead: the long-term effect of zero gravity on the body. Prolonged weightlessness causes muscle and bone tissue to atrophy, greatly increasing the risk of serious injury. A weightless astronaut can expect to lose about 1 percent of his or her bone mass per month. The absence of gravity also fools the body into reducing plasma and red blood cells, leading to anemia once gravity is restored.
Greetings From a Smoldering Crater
After a six-month flight and a lot of vomiting, you bump down on the surface of Mars. Your faithful return craft is standing nearby, brimming with methane rocket fuel, plus some newly made oxygen with which to burn it. As part of Mars Direct, you're not on one of those symbolic "plant the flag" missions, where astronauts jump around a bit, shoot a round of golf, and then leave. You'll be on Mars for a year and a half.
You even have wheels - a few Mars rovers - and there's plenty of fresh-made fuel. You'll go off-roading over miles of Martian territory, prying up rocks, digging for fossils, prospecting for minerals, rappelling down cliffs and craters. It'll all be live on the Web, provided space-lovin' Earthlings fork over the $29.95 someone will charge for unlimited access. And unlike lunar missions, this time the astronauts never stop coming - waves of spaceships will follow, quickly building a thriving community.
Of course, there are a few potential snags. One is the infamous Martian dust storms. The superfine dust, driven by winds as high as 60 mph, greatly reduces visibility and seeps into machinery, wreaking havoc on communications systems. Mariner 9, for example, had to wait four months in orbit for a Martian dust storm to clear before it could send data back to Earth.
Another problem is that humans can survive only a minute or two unprotected on the Martian surface. Even though supplies, power sources, and return spacecraft are sent ahead of time, the crew could run into plenty of calamities despite the "safety" of space suits and ship. Something might not show up on the craft's self-diagnostics, or a malfunction could develop after the astronauts arrive.
"The real risk is the thing you haven't thought of," says Benford. "Some unexpected feature that you weren't expecting crops out of the environment. So some damn thing is going to fail. But that's exactly what makes it fascinating."
The Only Good Martian Is a Dead Martian
It's called the Mars Society, but a more accurate name for the group might be the America Society. One reason to go to Mars, according to Zubrin's book, The Case for Mars, is to rekindle the frontier spirit that gave rise to America's "progressive humanistic culture." Zubrin has said he expects any colony on Mars would enjoy many of the same rights that exist in the good ol' USA, including the right to bear arms. (Good news for Martian gun nuts: Mars' gravity is only 38 percent of Earth's, which substantially increases your weapon's range.)
But even some Mars Society supporters are spooked by the group's jingoistic ideals. "There's a concern that the Mars Society is a bit too heavily dominated by Americans," says Adrian Hon, an 18-year-old Brit who cofounded Generation Mars, an outreach program that deploys an Up With People/Trekkie vibe to get youth interested in the planet. "This always comes up at the conferences, that Europeans don't get enough say. Obviously, America has a very strong space policy, but effectively, Mars will just be a colony of America if the current trend continues. It worries some people."
Others see a fundamental flaw in Zubrin comparing the exploration of Mars to the colonization of the New World or the American West. As Zubrin puts it in his book. "Mars is to the new age of exploration what North America was to the last."
"If you want an analogy for going to Mars, it's exploring Antarctica," says Robinson. "The Mars Society doesn't like that comparison because it's too small-scale, but it's the perfect analogy. Antarctica is scientifically useful. It's beautiful and interesting. The people who go there will fall in love with it, but they'll go down for a period of time and then they'll come back. The American West is a terrible image. It has all of this horrific baggage that Mars doesn't need to be connected with."
"I find the prospect of colonization a little far-fetched," adds Wired contributing editor Oliver Morton, whose book, Mapping Mars, will be published next year. "Mars is really a very nasty place for many reasons - poisonous soil, hard UV, near vacuum, little water, dodgy weather, homesickness, utter technological dependency, sheer bloody danger. I can't really see why anyone sane enough to make a go of it would want to live there other than on a short-term basis for fieldwork."
The Terror of Terraforming
As the years roll on, the pace picks up. You're not a tiny corps of space travelers; you're a thriving Martian community. The endgame of Mars Direct is to terraform the planet, creating a self-sustaining home away from home by radically manipulating the environment.
"One of the ideas that the Mars Society espouses that I think is very important is learning to live off the land," says NASA astronaut Franklin Chang-Dìaz, who has logged more than 1,200 hours in space since 1986. "You've got to be able to use the resources that are there. You can't transport all the supplies you're going to need to stay on Mars or any other planet."
Mars is no tropical paradise, but folks have suggested setting up vast Kevlar greenhouses where crops can be grown, drawing on the planet's ample supply of carbon dioxide. Eventually, the desolate land will be completely transformed into an out-of-this-world oasis. According to Mars Direct, this may require melting Mars' polar ice caps, thickening the atmosphere with even more carbon dioxide and creating a global greenhouse effect. Plants will thrive in the warmer climate and produce abundant oxygen. Colonists will then tear off their space suits and boogie free.
You'll truly be Martians.
And you'll also have the distinction of screwing up the climatic systems of two planets. Terraforming Mars makes sense on paper, but fundamentally upsetting its ecological balance may have unintended consequences, to say the least. Zubrin, however, believes it would be "unnatural" for humans to leave Mars in its natural state. "It would be a failure in our role as pioneers to leave Mars as a lifeless place when it could become a lush place," he says.
"Terraforming Mars is a fascinating concept," says Robinson. "I've looked at it in detail. But if they find bacteria on Mars, it's a terrible stopper to the plan. It would open the ethical question of whether we should be terraforming at all. Finding bacterial life on Mars would be one of the most important scientific discoveries ever, and you can't fool around with something like that. The Mars Society often attempts to fool with it."
But Zubrin is undeterred. He foresees Martian real estate being bought and sold to finance the development of settlements, as if humans already own the place. He calculates that at $10 per acre, Mars is worth $358 billion, but after terraforming, its value will rocket to $36 trillion. Just drop by your local Century 22 realty office and ask about their Red Orb sale-a-thon.
Getting Along With Your Crazy Martian Neighbors
Soon the political goal is reached: independence from Earth! You've finally achieved the dream - a society comprised entirely of space enthusiasts. Naturally, we'll all get along - just as we do on Earth.
Uh huh. In reality, even when like-minded people rally around a noble cause, political infighting invariably breaks out. Just ask author and futurist Marshall T. Savage, who found out the hard way. He established the First Millennial Foundation to promote citizen space exploration based on the principles laid out in his 1994 book, The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps, which advocates transferring a significant number of humans from Earth to nearby planets, moons, and asteroids. But Savage himself left the group in 1998 amid rancorous debates among members over tactics and direction.
"I had these idealistic notions about how space societies would be self-organizing groups, which is all well and good in theory," says Savage. "But in practice, believe me, the process is ugly. It's like getting a bunch of cats together in a burlap sack. The people who are most motivated to acquire political power will make their way to the top of an organization, even if they have to do it over the body of every other person there."
The first explorers on Mars will be under intense psychological pressure, isolated from Mother Earth and confined in small spaces. Fissure lines may form in unexpected places.
An Australian study of a dozen scientists who spent 72 days in the Antarctic in 1980 showed that even researchers working toward a common goal can get squirrelly under extreme conditions. Some scientists threatened to sabotage their colleagues' research, while others refused to participate in experiments.
Rigorous psychological screening may weed out the real nut cases before they get to Mars. But the sort of people likely to pass the tests with flying colors could have subtle "issues" of their own.
"I think for a Mars mission, you'll get a lot of secretive people who have interior lives that aren't like their exterior fronts," says Robinson. "And I don't think you can say, 'Well, we'll figure it out.'"
Send in the Bots
Here's the biggest problem with Mars: It's a terrible place to live. The atmosphere is 100 times thinner than Earth's and is made almost entirely of carbon dioxide. Sunlight is weak, but still gives off enough unshielded radiation to kill you. You have to live your life underground or in an airtight chamber. You have to grow your own food and manufacture enough fuel to fly around. And all of your fellow astronauts are secretly trying to sabotage your research. Or so you think.
For the next 20 years or so, why send humans to Mars at all? Why not send bots? The British are about to launch a Mars biology probe, called the Beagle 2, scheduled to land on Mars in December 2003 (see "The Beagle Has Landed"). This is one cool bot, and it's even got a chance of turning up microbial life, which would rank as one of the most astounding scientific discoveries of all time.
The Mars Global Surveyor, an orbiter launched by NASA in 1996, is currently scanning the planet and spewing amazing photos onto the Web (www.msss.com/moc_gallery) - more than 67,500 images at last count. You want to study Mars? Go ahead! You don't need the Mars Society.
"From my own inside view of the Mars Society, I would hate to have them run the space program," says Robinson. "I love them dearly and think they're important advocates of an important cause. But there's still an existing group of space scientists and professionals whose expertise can't be swept aside."
So carry on, noble Mars Society. Spin your rocket dreams, get people excited about reaching for the stars. But leave the science to the probes. We may get to Mars someday, but it will take at least another 20 or 30 years. And that's probably a good thing. Because ultimately, Mars may be better off without us.
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