Monthly Archives: February 2008

Mars

Who Will Be the First Martians?

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You? Me? Martians??

Could you live on Mars? Would you want to? Would anybody want to? Why?Forget about the political issues that always get raised when somebody brings up Mars exploration for now; they’re a subject of another discussion. I want to focus people’s thoughts on what it would be like if one could get to Mars and visit or live there. Would you want to?

It’s not, as I’ve written in one of my planetarium shows, a quick jaunt. Anybody going to Mars has to be prepared for a lengthy Earth-Mars trajectory. You’d spend about 18 months getting there; that’s a year and a half of low gravity conditions, living in close quarters with a bunch of other people and no chance to get outside for a stroll along the way. There’s no way to stretch your legs, visit a waystation, check out some interesting side-trails. It’s a straight shot.

And, when you get there, it’s a whole new ecology to get used to. Probably you’d live underground or in heavily shielded quarters. You, along with everybody else, will have had extensive training in order to survive Mars; that training would include learning how to live in surface suits that feed you breathable air and protect you from the extreme ultraviolet radiation that cuts through Mars’s thin atmosphere. You’d have a job to do; what it is will depend on what your skills are. Mars colonies (if that’s what we intended to build) will need everything that any frontier “town” would need: people to build things, people to study things, people to suss out the dangerous conditions and help everybody else avoid them (or learn to live with them).

Even if you were part of a solely scientific expedition, everybody would have multiple jobs that span the science studies and survival goals. You can’t send an infinite number of people to Mars, so the ones who DO go will have to be cross-trained.

So, could YOU do it? Would you want to?

Lunar exploration, NASA

Walkin’ on the Moon

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How Important is It?

The Altair Lunar Lander, proposed by NASA

I’ve been swapping a lot of email with a colleague lately about the future of space exploration. He and his minions are working on a project that explores humanity’s future, not just in space, but in science research in general. One of the core “nubs” of our conversations have been about what it takes today to get people excited about the ideas and technologies needed for space exploration.

The political environment today is very mixed and muddled about space exploration. For example, at least one candidate for U.S. president, Barack Obama, has called for a postponement of some NASA programs (notably the Constellation program) and the money saved to be put into education. Of course, the obvious fact is that we (as a country) are pouring a lot of money into education already. So, I have to ask, how will the little dab (comparatively) of money that is taken from NASA benefit the behemoth that is U.S. education, especially if ALL that other money didn’t do the job? If we really want to pour some money into education, well, there’s a whole big military budget that could use a little trimming…

Now, I’m NOT anti-education, so don’t go there. But, if we’re going to go to space in the future (and this is something that the U.S. as a country HAS pursued for these many years, then we need to have educated workers. No doubt about it. But, it’s not smart to take away the projects that will provide the jobs that we’re educating the kids for… I think that is pretty obvious.

Well, we COULD do what Senator Obama wants to do, although I doubt we should. Reality will set in for the senator, pretty fast. But, the bigger issue here is, how do we excite people about the future in space? Particularly when things here on the ground are SO unsettled?

Is it going to take another space race? The U.S. isn’t the only player in town when it comes to off-Earth research and development (and future plans for such). Plenty of other countries are interested in and working toward some sort of space-based presence for humans. Is this the future? Will seeing a group of Chinese/Japanese/Russian/French/you name the country entrepreneurs building a hotel on the Moon be enough to spark the planet’s will to put differences aside and go to space?? What is it about space that will excite the next generation to want to live there, travel there, study the other planets?

These are questions we continue to mull…