A space station could serve inspirational and educational purposes, and it certainly can help to solidify relations among the spacefaring nations—particularly the United States and Russia. But the only substantive function of a space station, as far as I can see, is for long-duration spaceflight. How do humans behave in micro gravity? How can we counter progressive changes in blood chemistry and an estimated 6 percent bone loss per year in zero gravity? (For a three- or four-year mission to Mars this adds up, if the travelers have to go at zero g.)
These are hardly questions in fundamental biology such as DNA or the evolutionary process; instead they address issues of applied human biology. It's important to know the answers, but only if we intend to go somewhere in space that's far away and takes a long time to get there. The only tangible and coherent goal of a space station is eventual human missions to near-Earth asteroids, Mars, and beyond. Historically NASA has been cautious about stating this fact clearly, probably for fear that members of Congress will throw up their hands in disgust, denounce the space station as the thin edge of an extremely expensive wedge, and declare the country unready to commit to launching people to Mars. In effect, then, NASA has kept quiet about what the space station is really for. And yet if we had such a space station, nothing would require us to go straight to Mars. We could use a space station to accumulate and refine the relevant knowledge, and take as long as we like to do so—so that when the time does come, when we are ready to go to the planets, we will have the background and experience to do so safely.
The Mars Observer failure, and the catastrophic loss of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986, remind us that there will be a certain irreducible chance of disaster in future human flights to Mars and elsewhere. The Apollo 13 mission, which was unable to land on the Moon and barely returned safely to Earth, underscores how lucky we've been. We cannot make perfectly safe autos or trains even though we've been at it for more than a century. Hundreds of thousands of years after we first domesticated fire, every city in the world has a service of firefighters biding their time until there's a blaze that needs putting out. In Columbus' four voyages to the New World, he lost ships left and right, including one third of the little fleet that set out in 1492.
If we are to send people, it must be for a very good reason—and with a realistic understanding that almost certainly we will lose lives. Astronauts and cosmonauts have always understood this. Nevertheless, there has been and will be no shortage of volunteers.
But why Mars? Why not return to the Moon? It's nearby, and we've proved we know how to send people there. I'm concerned that the Moon, close as it is, is a long detour, if not a dead end. We've been there. We've even brought some of it back. People have seen the Moon rocks, and, for reasons that I believe are fundamentally sound, they are bored by the Moon. It's a static, airless, waterless, black-sky, dead world. Its most interesting aspect perhaps is its cratered surface, a record of ancient ,catastrophic impacts, on the Earth as well as on the Moon.
Mars, by contrast, has weather, dust storms, its own moons, volcanos, polar ice caps, peculiar landforms, ancient river valleys, and evidence of massive climatic change on a once-Earthlike world. It holds some prospect of past or maybe even present life, and is the most congenial planet for future life—humans transplanted from Earth, living off the land. None of this is true for the Moon. Mars also has its own legible cratering history. It Mars, rather than the Moon, had been within easy reach, we would not have backed off from manned space flight.
Nor is the Moon an especially desirable test bed or way station for Mars. The Martian and lunar environments are very different, and the Moon is as distant from Mars as is the Earth. The machinery for Martian exploration can at least equally well be tested in Earth orbit, or on near-Earth asteroids, or on the Earth itself—in Antarctica, for instance.
Japan has tended to be skeptical of the commitment of the United States and other nations to plan and execute major cooperative projects in space. This is at least one reason that Japan, more than any other spacefaring nation, has tended to go it alone. The Lunar and Planetary Society of Japan is an organization representing space enthusiasts in the government, universities, and major industries. As I write, the Society is proposing to construct and stock a lunar base entirely with robot labor. It is said to take about 30 years and to cost about a billion U.S. dollars a year (which would represent 7 percent of the present U.S. civilian space budget). Humans would arrive only when the base is fully ready. The use of robot construction crews under radio command from Earth is said to reduce the cost tenfold. The only trouble with the scheme, according to reports, is that other scientists in Japan keep asking, "What's it for?" That's a good question in every nation.
The first human mission to Mars is now probably too expensive for any one nation to pull off by itself. Nor is it fitting that such a historic step be taken by representatives of only a small fraction of the human species. But a cooperative venture among the United States, Russia, Japan, the European Space Agency—and perhaps other nations, such as China—might be feasible in the not too distant future. The international space station will have tested our ability to work together on great engineering projects in space.
The cost of sending a kilogram of something no farther away than low Earth orbit is today about the same as the cost of kilogram of gold. This is surely a major reason we have yet to stride the ancient shorelines of Mars. Multistage chemical rockets are the means that first took us into space, and that's what we've been using ever since. We've tried to refine them, to make there safer, more reliable, simpler, cheaper. But that hasn't happened, or at least not nearly as quickly as many had hoped.
So maybe there's a better way: maybe single-stage rockets that can launch their payloads directly to orbit; maybe many small payloads shot from guns or rocket-launched from airplanes; maybe supersonic ramjets. Maybe there's something much better that we haven't thought of yet. If we can manufacture propellants for the return trip from the air and soil of our destination world, the difficulty of the voyage would be greatly eased.
Once we're up there in space, venturing to the planets, rocketry is not necessarily the best means to move large payloads around, even with gravity assists. Today, we make a few early rocket burns and later midcourse corrections, and coast the rest of the way. But there are promising ion and nuclear/ electric propulsion systems by which a small and steady acceleration is exerted. Or, as the Russian space pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky first envisioned, we could employ solar sails—vast but very thin films that catch sunlight and the solar wind, a caravel kilometers wide plying the void between the worlds. Especially for trips to Mars and beyond, such methods are far better than rockets.
As with most technologies, when something barely works, when it's the first of its kind, there's a natural tendency to improve it, develop it, exploit it. Soon there's such an institutional investment in the original technology, no matter how flawed, that it's very hard to move on to something better. NASA has almost no resources to pursue alternative propulsion technologies. That money would have to come out of near-term missions, missions which could provide concrete results and improve NASA's success record. Spending money on alternative technologies pays off a decade or two in the future. We tend to be very little interested in a decade or two in the future. This is one of the ways by which initial success can sow the seeds of ultimate failure; and is very similar to what sometimes happens in biological evolution. But sooner or later some nation—perhaps one without a huge investment in marginally effective technology—will develop effective alternatives.
Even before then, if we take a cooperative path, there will come a time—perhaps in the first decades of the new century and the new millennium—when an interplanetary spacecraft is assembled in Earth orbit, the progress in full view on the evening news. Astronauts and cosmonauts, hovering like gnats, guide and mate the prefabricated parts. Eventually the ship, tested and ready, is boarded by its international crew, and boosted to escape velocity. For the whole of the voyage to Mars and back, the lives of the crew members depend on one another, a microcosm of our actual circumstances down here on Earth. Perhaps the first joint interplanetary mission with human crews will be only a flyby or orbit of Mars. Earlier, robot vehicles, with aerobraking, parachutes, and retrorockets, will have set gently down on the Martian surface to collect samples and return them to Earth, and to emplace supplies for future explorers. But whether or not we have compelling, coherent reasons, I am sure—unless we destroy ourselves first—that the day will come when we humans set foot on Mars. It is only a matter of when.
According to solemn treaty, signed in Washington and Moscow on January 27, 1967, no nation may lay claim to part or all of another planet. Nevertheless—for historical reasons that Columbus would have understood well—some people are concerned about who first sets foot on Mars. If this really worries us, we can arrange for the ankles of the crew members to be tied together as they alight in the gentle Martian gravity.
The crews would acquire new and previously sequestered samples, in part to search for life, in part to understand the past and future of Mars and Earth. They would experiment, for later expeditions, on extracting water, oxygen, and hydrogen from the rocks and the air and from the underground permafrost—to drink, to breathe, to power their machines and, as rocket fuel and oxidizer, to propel the return voyage. They would test Martian materials for eventual fabrication of bases and settlements on Mars.
And they would go exploring. When I imagine the early human exploration of Mars, it's always a roving vehicle, a little like a jeep, wandering down one of the valley networks, the crew with geological hammers, cameras, and analytic instruments at the ready. They're looking for rocks from ages past, signs of ancient cataclysms, clues to climate change, strange chemistries, fossils, or—most exciting and most unlikely—something alive. Their discoveries are televised back to Earth at the speed of light. Snuggled up in bed with the kids, you explore the ancient riverbeds of Mars.
CHAPTER 16 SCALING HEAVEN
Who, my friend, can scale heaven?
—THE EPIC OF GILGAMESH (SUMER, THIRD MILLENNIUM B.C.)
What?, I sometimes ask myself in amazement: Our ancestors walked from East Africa to Novaya Zemlya and Ayers Rock and Patagonia, hunted elephants with stone spearpoints, traversed the polar seas in open boats 7,000 years ago, circumnavigated the Earth propelled by nothing but wind, walked the Moon a decade after entering space—and we're daunted by a voyage to Mars? But then I remind myself of the avoidable human suffering on Earth, how a few dollars can save the life of a child dying of dehydration, how many children we could save for the cost of a trip to Mars—and for the moment I change my mind. Is it unworthy to stay home or unworthy to go? Or have I posed a false dichotomy? Isn't it possible to make a better life for everyone on Earth and to reach for the planets and the stars?
We had an expansive run in the '60s and '70s. You might have thought, as I did then, that our species would be on Mars before the century was over. But instead, we've pulled inward. Robots aside, we've backed off from the planets and the stars. 1 keep asking myself Is it a failure of nerve or a sign of maturity?
Maybe it's the most we could reasonably have expected. In a way it's amazing that it was possible at all: We sent a dozen humans on week-long excursions to the Moon. And we were given the resources to make a preliminary reconnaissance of the whole Solar System, out to Neptune anyway—missions that returned a wealth of data, but nothing of short-term, everyday, bread-on-the-table practical value. They lifted the human spirit, though. They enlightened us about our place in the Universe. It's easy to imagine skeins of historical causality in which there were no race to the Moon and no planetary program.
But it's also possible to imagine a much more serious devotion to exploration, because of which we would today have robot vehicles probing the atmospheres of all the Jovian planets and dozens of moons, comets, and asteroids; a network of automatic scientific stations emplaced on Mars would daily be reporting their findings; and samples from many worlds would be under examination in the laboratories of Earth—revealing their geology, chemistry, and perhaps even their biology. Human outposts might be already established on the near-Earth asteroids, the Moon, and Mars.
There were many possible historical paths. Our particular causality skein has brought us to a modest and rudimentary, although in many respects heroic, series of explorations. But it is far interior to what might have been—and what may one day be.
TO CARRY THE GREEN Promethean spark of Life with us into the sterile void and ignite there a firestorm of animate matter is the very destiny of our race," reads the brochure of something called the First Millennial Foundation. It promises, for $120 a year, "citizenship" in "space colonies—when the time comes." "Benefactors" who contribute more also receive "the undying gratitude of a star-flung civilization, and their name carved on the monolith to be erected on the Moon." This represents one extreme in the continuum of enthusiasm for a human presence in space. The other extreme—better represented in Congress—questions why we should be in space at all, especially people rather than robots. The Apollo program was a "moondoggle," the social critic Amitai Etzioni once called it; with the Cold War over, there is no justification whatever, proponents of this orientation hold, for a manned space program. Where in this spectrum of policy options should we be?
Ever since the United States beat the Soviet Union to the Moon, a coherent, widely understood justification for humans in space seems to have vanished. Presidents and Congressional committees puzzle over what to do with the manned space program. What is it for? Why do we need it? But the exploits of the astronauts and the moon landings had elicited—and for good reason—the admiration of the world. It would be a rejection of that stunning American achievement, the political leaders tell themselves, to back off from manned spaceflight. Which President, which Congress wishes to be responsible for the end of the American space program? And in the former Soviet Union a similar argument is heard: Shall we abandon, they ask themselves, the one remaining high technology in which we are still world leaders? Shall we be faithless heirs of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Sergei Korolev, and Yuri Gagarin?
