Feature
Pie in the sky
by Marilyn Head
The breathtaking new images from Mars have the seductive familiarity of holiday snapshots. But what’s the reality check on using a big chunk of the American economic pie to set up a moonbase for manned expeditions to Mars?
In 1961, President Kennedy’s audacious challenge to the US to commit itself to “landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth” before the decade was out, was greeted with both shock and exhilaration. The sum total of experience in manned space flight at that time amounted to a single 15-minute trip by Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin and America’s record in the embryonic years of the Space Age had been less than illustrious. Yet, the Kennedy challenge was backed up by enough hard cash and nationalistic fervour to enable a generation of young scientists to achieve that “giant leap for mankind” barely eight years later.
Forty years on, however, the reaction to President Bush’s space programme to establish a moonbase by 2015, and use it as a stepping stone for manned expeditions to Mars, has been lukewarm at best. A sceptical public has cast its bleary eye over yet another revival of manned space exploration, yawned and switched off. Outside NASA and the space flight enthusiasts, it is hard to find even cautious approval. If Bush intended the programme as a vote-catcher, he must be sadly disillusioned by polls that show that Americans would prefer to spend their money elsewhere. Part of the cynicism stems from the fact that successive space projects, from Reagan’s “Star Wars” to Bush Sr’s “Mars Base”, have resulted in budget blowouts of such gigantic proportions that they have been unceremoniously dumped. A more serious objection is that the diversion of a large chunk of the science budget into manned space flight is bad for science. “I don’t want to pour cold water on the idea,” says Professor Denis Sullivan, astrophysicist at Victoria University. “I am as excited by the idea of going to Mars as anyone else, but then reality kicks in. The overheads associated with sending humans into space are enormous and the risks are too high.”
Dr Warren Dickinson, a geologist working with one of NASA’s principal investigators to develop a robotic drill for Mars, agrees. “You only need to look at the huge number of scientific papers from any unmanned probe, compared with the few from the International Space Station [ISS], to be able to put a dollar value on the cost of science and see which is more productive. There’s no need to send humans to Mars – we can’t even guarantee the safety of astronauts in the Space Shuttle, for Pete’s sake!”
He has a point. A hoped-for reprieve for the final shuttle mission to service the outstandingly successful Hubble space telescope has been turned down precisely for reasons of crew safety. Ironically, the beautiful images taken by the Hubble, and generously made publicly available, have been instrumental in keeping interest in space travel alive. They have done for this generation what artists like Chesley Bonestell and Lucien Rudaux did for earlier ones – excite imagination and curiosity with images of other worlds that are both exotic and tantalisingly real. Similarly, the breathtaking landscapes imaged by the Mars rovers have the seductive familiarity of a holiday snapshot rather than an alien world 50 million kilometres away. “People completely underestimate the difficulty of the step from the Moon to Mars,” says Sullivan.
The idea of treating the Moon, a mere 400,000km away, as a “stepping stone” to Mars makes about as much sense as building an airport on Waiheke Island to be closer to San Francisco. Well, not quite. The Moon’s lower gravitational force means that less energy would be required to leave it and therefore it would be cheaper, but, as former rocket scientist Dr Jez Weston points out, “it would be even easier to start from high orbit, when you’re not down any ‘gravity well’ – the Moon or Earth’s. It is also easier to assemble complicated spacecraft in zero gravity. As for using the Moon’s resources, it is true that there is a lot of aluminium there, but to mine it you would have to ship up most of the equipment. It’s a lot easier to mine aluminium down here! And more advanced materials, such as high-strength carbon fibre, would still have to be made on Earth.”
The reality is that any trip to Mars would involve years of space travel and, although time is not a significant factor for robots, it is for humans. To the financial and payload cost of life-
support systems, add the increased risks of radiation from unpredictable solar flares and the unknown physiological effects of prolonged exposure to micro-gravity and it’s easy to see why robotic missions, at a tenth of the cost and with no risk to human life, are favoured. Dickinson worries that science programmes, like the one he is working on, will be cut as the funding is refocused on human space exploration.
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