When I was a kid I loved those board games that let you take
a shortcut to get to the “finish” square first. Everybody's favorite is: “Go directly
to Go and collect $200,” from Monopoly.
An interplanetary shortcut was implied last week when NASA’s new administrator, astronaut Charles Bolden, said he would like to see humans venture beyond the moon and onto other destinations in the solar system. The 62 year-old administrator said that he’d like to see humans on Mars within his lifetime.
Could we get to the Red Planet in the next 25 years? I’d say only if we sidestep spending all the time and resources to set up a base on the moon, i.e. “go, past moon, go directly to Mars.”
In some of the think-tank NASA and aerospace contractor studies from the 1960s the value of a space station and lunar base was questioned as intermediate steps to Mars. A direct leap to Mars was considered a bold expansion that would keep the public imagination engaged, as echoed by Bolden’s recent statement.
The 1960s studies reflect the technical know-how needed to land a crew on Mars by the mid 1980s. But we didn’t have the money to do it.
The money vanished when, just two months after the Apollo 11 moon landing, a public opinion pole showed that 56 percent of Americans wanted to spend less on space exploration. President Richard Nixon took one look at these numbers and opted for a less costly NASA program that would put emphasis on building a space shuttle, space station, and conducting robotic exploration of the planets.
Human exploration of Mars had to wait.
We’ve now come full circle where Bolden is implying more of an Apollo-style accelerated program to pull off a Mars trip within the near future.
Many Mars “quickie-trip” scenarios were explored in the 1960s. One study reported that a Mars landing could be achieved in nine years following awarding of aerospace contracts, because it was built largely upon Apollo-derived moon hardware.
Plans called for at least four Saturn V launches to assemble the Mars transport in low Earth orbit. A nuclear propulsion system would get the crew there quickly. En route, the craft would be rotated to produce and artificial gravity of 0.4g. (Eliminating the need for years of microgravity medical research on a space station.)
NASA’s planned Ares V, the Saturn V follow-on booster, has the ability to loft nearly 200 tons into low Earth orbit (equal to the cargo capacity of 10 space shuttle flights). If NASA continues to develop this rocket, we’ll have the muscle for manned interplanetary voyages.
But forget about developing nuclear propulsion. We’ve become a nation of wussies with just the mention of the word nuclear – “boo!” So a chemically propelled Mars ship will be heavier, slower, and more expensive; requiring more launches to assemble. (If the International Space Station weren’t in the wrong inclination orbit, this would be the place to piece together and checkout the Mars mothership.)
Arguably, the only true space visionary in the manned exploration program was Apollo’s chief architect, Wernher von Braun. His career spanned from lobbing Nazi missiles into London during WWII to launching the first U.S. artificial satellite in 1958. In the 1960s he boldly proposed landing a crew of eight astronauts on Mars by 1982 to set up a base. They would stay on Mars until Congress appropriated money for a follow-up mission to retrieve the crew and bring them back to Earth! (This idea was even in Arthur C. Clarke’s 1968 novel, 2001 A Space Odyssey. The mission to survey the alien black monolith on the Saturnian moon Iapetus was one-way, and required a separate retrieval mission to bring the crew back.)
Today’s dilemma can be best summarized in a statement from president Lyndon Johnson’s science advisor, Donald Hornig, in 1965. He said that the dream of sending humans to Mars would have to wait until the nation could accept the cost without sacrificing other important programs.
Since then we’ve squander $2 trillion on an unnecessary war, and hundreds of billions of dollars to offset corporate greed. We are now looking for money to implement a $1 trillion national health care program. And, doing all of this while reducing the national deficit.
In the 1960s the cost of a Mars manned program (utilizing already developed Apollo launch systems) was estimated to be five times the cost of the Apollo moon program. In today’s dollars, that would come out to nearly $700 billion. And, that’s not even taking into account that we are nearly starting from scratch.
This makes me very pessimistic about us ever considering human Mars exploration an affordable national priority.
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