Yet across the gulf of space… intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.’
H. G. Wells, War of the Worlds
MARTIANS WANTED
Ernest Shackleton famously placed a small advertisement for an Antarctic expedition crew in The Times: ‘MEN WANTED for hazardous journey, small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful, honour and recognition in case of success.’ Despite the dire warnings, hundreds of men eager for adventure and glory applied. Except they didn’t. No one did. The truth is the advert never existed. We are easily fooled by this urban myth because we instinctively sense what such a call to action means and what’s so seductive about the idea. We’re emotionally drawn to the idea of ‘the frontier’, like a moth to the light, whatever the dangers may be.
Imagine a similar call to action for a journey to Mars sometime in the near future. What would be in store for you on a trip on the interplanetary liner HMS Elon Musk? A three year round trip, with one port of call. Permanent confinement to the stateroom during the traverse. Severe radiation risks from solar events spewing forth from our sun, and other cosmic nasties. Profound physiological issues – bone and muscle loss and macular degeneration caused by the ravages of a zero-gravity environment. Profound psychological discomfort would be a certainty – boredom, anxiety, cabin fever. No escape from your crewmates. No escape from yourself. No visual connection between you and the earth from the window, and limited communications back home to talk to friends and loved ones you’re leaving behind.
And that’s the good bit. When you arrive, life gets challenging. Mars’s painfully thin carbon dioxide atmosphere would mean multiple problems to overcome, not least the difficulty of slowing a spacecraft down to reach the surface safely, a surface completely unable to sustain human life. This would mean near-permanent confinement inside some form of temporary pressurized inflated shelter, and what forays you would make outside would be in your spacesuit. Let’s hope you’ve got a spare one. Maybe two. Hopefully some crucial infrastructure will be up and running for when you arrive: a vital source of power from a nuclear generator, perhaps. Oxygen and water would have to be reclaimed with equipment such as a MOXIE (Mars OXygen In Situ Resource Utilization Experiment), a machine designed at MIT soon to be tested on the new Mars 2020 Rover, that converts Mars’s CO2 atmosphere into oxygen. Frozen water ice would need to be mined from beneath the surface or extracted from the regolith.
The temperatures vary dramatically, depending on where and when you go. The equatorial regions can be as high as 20°C in the summer if you’re very lucky, but on average it’s going to be well below freezing and plummeting to -100°C or lower, colder than any of the research stations even in inland Antarctica. A lack of any sort of magnetic field means the surface is bombarded with intense solar and cosmic radiation. On earth, this is deflected by the magnetic field driven by our geological engine – our internal core of iron – a system that stalled on Mars sometime in its history. Any long-term Martian shelter would have to protect you. Are you going to go all that way to live underground? If you’re unlucky, the thin winds, which you would hardly feel, will pick up the fine dust causing planetary dust storms, events that might shroud the view for weeks on end.
Once you’re there, you’ll have to stay for a while. Getting to and from Mars is entirely dependent on our orbits and proximities to each other, ranging from about 55 million km (opposition) to 400 million km (conjunction). There are small, strictly adhered to windows of opportunity for your departure and return – remember, you’re aiming at a moving target from a moving target. You could choose an ‘opposition-class’ mission, staying 1–3 months, or ‘conjunction-class’, around 18 months, or extend your trip further with ‘fast transit’. Or just stay forever.
Mars analogue missions here on earth always have a possibility of escape. An end in sight. A door back to the real world. Here on Mars, all doors are firmly bolted. If you’re still alive and sane, your safe return may indeed be doubtful. You would in return be guaranteed some of the most spectacular views in the solar system. And ‘honour and recognition’ in case of success.
Do you still want to go? Of course you do. And the good news is they’re already planning your trip.
A STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND
Why do you want to go? Tourism? Exploration? Science? To fulfil mankind’s destiny? To start a new life, never to return? For all the difficulties involved, and whatever your motivations, Mars is still by far the best option for a space destination beyond the moon. It’s the only place that’s close enough and where we can just about imagine our current or near-future technologies sustaining our frail bodies. The crushing hellish furnace of our other nearby neighbour Venus holds no respite for the weary traveller. Mars is familiar in many ways, a solid rocky surface you can stand on, albeit at 38 per cent of your weight due to its smaller size, which is useful for the rockets wanting to take you back home. There is evidence written into its surface of water, the single most important raw material needed to support us. The water no longer flows freely,* but waits to be mined, frozen beneath the surface. With water and CO2 you can produce a whole host of useful things, including oxygen to breathe, and hydrogen and methane for rocket fuel. Without water, the dream is over.
For the sightseer, Mars is rich in vistas, familiar to us from the millions of high resolution images sent back by the recent orbiters and rovers. There are the big mustsee tourist destinations like Olympus Mons, the highest volcano in the solar system; the great Valles Marineris, a planetary gash extending about the width of the United States that puts our own Grand Canyon to shame; the polar ice caps of frozen CO2; the craters, caves, lava tubes, dried up river valleys and dunes to explore. And then there are the alien landscapes, frozen in time on a stalled planet, that we have yet to imagine. On a clear day in winter, you would see the high, wispy cirrus clouds. And in the night sky, the Earth as a tiny pale-blue dot amid a billion pinpricks of light. Mars is a planet unspoilt.
For the scientist, Mars has become the ultimate multi-disciplinary destination, whether you’re a meteorologist, geophysicist, engineer, chemist, geologist, astrobiologist or psychologist. Over the last sixty years we’ve sent dozens of spacecraft for a closer look – right now six orbiters are watching from the sky as well as two rovers still functioning on the surface, with more remote sensing missions to follow. Much has been revealed, but much is still to be learned – information about the formation of the early solar system, for example, will still be visible in the Martian rocks; our own early history has been erased by the constant recycling of the dynamic Earth’s crust. Central to all of the science, as well as our imaginings, is the enduring question of life. Did life propagate in a once warmer, wetter Mars? Is there evidence of that life now? Or are there conditions for life, of some sort, to still take hold? Humanity’s most profound question will reposition our place in the universe once again. The parameters of this question are revealing themselves with a growing clarity.
For the cultural visitor, we have a long artistic relationship with Mars and its imagined inhabitants, through the great science fiction writers like Ray Bradbury, H.G. Wells and Robert Heinlein, as well as legions of TV producers and film-makers who have shaped Mars through the imagination. This ‘other’ Mars has always walked closely alongside its scientific twin. Recently Andy Weir’s book (and film) The Martian revisited Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe narrative, coming hot on the heels of the latest scientific revelation that Mars may, under certain conditions, have a form of running water – the salvation for any desert island castaway. The real and the imagined walk cheek by jowl. And sometimes they get confused: in the 1930s, it was reported that following Orson Welles’s radio dramatization of The War of the Worlds there was mass panic across America as listeners thought the Martian invasion at Grover’s Mill was real. You know the story I’m sure: people fleeing cities, having nervous breakdowns, a country in terror at the Martian invasion. It seems though that while there were a few dramatic headlines – ‘Fake Radio War Stirs Terror Through U.S.’ – it was the ‘fake’ news story of its day. There was no terror. There was no mass panic at all. Like Shackleton’s fake advert, we are easily seduced by a glorious idea and dare not check too carefully for fear of breaking the spell.
Perhaps you’re motivated to go by something grander. By wanting to bring about the dream of making humans a multi-planetary species – to create a new permanent home on our most extreme frontier, or as an insurance policy against some catastrophic disaster on Earth. At a conference in Guadalajara in September 2016, Elon Musk gave a deadpan, matter-of-fact presentation outlining his audacious plans for human colonization, proposing fleets of spaceships taking thousands of people to Mars, like the first wave of American settlers. Could this have been the PowerPoint presentation marking the beginning of a new chapter in human evolution? What future lies ahead for us after the first humans are born on another world? It could have been Tsiolkovsky standing there, or von Braun or Edward Nkoloso – all of whom had Mars in their sights, but who lacked the immense power of social media to capture the world’s attention.
Whatever your reasons, Mars is now a realistic(ish) physical destination. More than just a stage to play out our fantasies. But it wasn’t always that way.
A PALE RED DOT
The story of how we’ve unlocked Mars’s secrets is as illuminating as the secrets themselves. For almost all of human history, all we’ve had to go on is a red pinprick of light in the sky on a dark, star-filled night. Mars wasn’t a destination but part of a prevailing worldview – a celestial object on which civilizations could project the parochial beliefs of the time, the relics of such thinking still lurking in astrology today. The word planet comes from the Greek word meaning ‘wanderer’. The Egyptian, Chinese, Babylonian, Greek and Roman civilizations were all aware of this enigmatic point of light with its unusual colour and its peculiar looping ‘retrograde’ path across the sky relative to the fixed stars. For an ancient astronomer, Mars’s movement, in which it suddenly seemed to double back on itself, was a mystery. Even today it’s not immediately obvious what is going on. Imagine athletes running around a running track. Mars is in an outside lane relative to us as we zip around the sun. As we overtake Mars on the inside, the observer here on Earth sees Mars appearing to move backwards in the sky, in a loop. It’s one of nature’s powerful illusions.
It wouldn’t be the last time Mars would fool us.
ADJUSTING THE FOCUS
‘All philosophy, said I, is founded on two things; an inquisitive mind, and defective sight…’
Bernard le Bouvier de Fontenelle, Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds
Technology has brought Mars closer to us. The newly invented telescope was pointed towards Mars by Galileo Galilei in 1609 and gave us our first blurry close-up look. Mars was now a spot rather than a dot. Fifty years later, the Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens brought Mars even nearer, noticing dark patches and a polar ice cap. A spot was changing to a disc, with structure and features that changed with time and seasons, and of course with this came the speculation of life. With William Herschel (1738–1822) we entered a new era of observations, as he highlighted the similarities between Mars and the Earth. He said: ‘I have often noticed occasional changes of partial bright spots…; and also once a darkish one… And these alterations we can hardly ascribe to any other cause than the variable disposition of clouds and vapours… And that planet has a considerable but moderate atmosphere, so that its inhabitants probably enjoy a situation in many respects similar to ours.’
LOST IN TRANSLATION
Over time, earthbound telescopes became increasingly powerful, but as well as bringing celestial objects closer they were limited by the distortion caused by light passing through our atmosphere, which in turn amplified the creative power of the human brain to fool itself. In 1877, the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli inadvertently caused one of modern science’s greatest misunderstandings, when observing Mars at its closest point to earth (opposition). Schiaparelli knew the importance of a steady hand and clear mind when making astronomical observations. He banned himself from alcohol, narcotics and coffee. He described and drew dark striations that he saw on the Martian surface, which he called canali, simply meaning ditch, channel or trough.
But American astronomer Percival Lowell, working from his observatory high up in Flagstaff, Arizona at the turn of the twentieth century, conflated Schiaparelli’s naturally occurring canali with the idea of engineered, intelligently designed ‘canals’. Lowell didn’t think there were canals on Mars, he knew there were canals. Schiaparelli’s rather curved broad channels suddenly straightened out under Lowell’s gaze, with the addition of round junction points (which Lowell termed ‘Oases’). All this led to one indisputable conclusion: these canals were an irrigation system, part of a planetary geo-engineering project to protect and redirect water to Mars’s arid regions by the Martian inhabitants. Of course, this was sensational news that was spread across the world. It’s a salutary lesson: a clear desert atmosphere, a fine telescope and superb eyesight, which Lowell apparently had, are no defence against the distorting pattern-seeking power of the mind. Such bias is easy to see in others. Harder to recognize in ourselves.
Such yearnings aren’t confined to history. Richard Hoagland, an American conspiracy theorist, is still out there promoting the ‘Face on Mars’ phenomenon: a raised mesa in the Cydonia region, which when photographed by the Viking Orbiter in the 1970s resembled a Sphinx-like human face looking at the sky. Hoagland interpreted this as evidence of alien design. It’s clearly a case of pareidolia, a well understood phenomenon whereby the brain sees faces in random visual noise where none exist. Even though the mesa has been re-photographed in superb clarity revealing nothing at all, the die-hards will continue seeing what they want to see. It’s not just faces Hoagland’s spotted – he’s seen various architectural ruins, pyramids and evidence of the rubble of an entire ancient city. All pointing to evidence of a Martian civilization. It’s entertaining stuff, and will give you plenty to think about when you get there.
Seeing is very often believing. But believing doesn’t make things true. Occasionally bits of Mars come to us as meteorites, ejected from the surface of the planet by impact events. These have found their way to the Earth, across millions of miles of space, lying undisturbed only to be discovered by meteorite hunters. In the 1980s the Allan Hills (named after the region in Antarctica where it was found) 84001 meteorite was discovered. An interesting rock for a whole host of reasons, not least because of what was seen under the electron microscope over a decade later – the image of what looked like a minute worm-shaped structure. Could this be some sort of fossilized nano bacteria? The smoking gun, the answer to the great scientific question – evidence of past life on Mars? In 1996, Bill Clinton made a televised announcement about the findings from the south lawn of the White House. Sadly, it was generally agreed by the scientific community to be a resounding no.
Canals, swathes of vegetation and entire civilizations have featured heavily in the Mars story. The great American astronomer and writer Carl Sagan said it best during his Christmas lecture at the Royal Institution: ‘Where we have strong emotions, we’re liable to fool ourselves.’
After centuries of looking at Mars, going there is now a possibility. These days it seems anyone who’s anyone has an extravagant plan to open up the new Martian frontier. Buzz Aldrin is rarely seen these days without his motivational ‘Get Your Ass to Mars’ T-shirt. The Dutch entrepreneur Bas Lansdorp’s ‘Mars One’ plan to send a colony of settlers on a one-way trip to the red planet began in 2012 with a call for colonists. There was no shortage of volunteers, with 200,000 people signing up for the trip. Some of these plans are short on detail and big on hyperbole; some are more realistic than others. Robert Zubrin, the founder of The Mars Society, which runs the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah, drew up a detailed low-cost plan called Mars Direct in the 1990s. Zubrin remains a passionate advocate of getting human to Mars, and is a vocal critic of NASA’s own Mars plans, which he accuses of being wasteful, bureaucratic and lacking any sort of real focus.
But the grandfather of all Mars plans was Wernher von Braun’s Das Marsprojekt. In 1952 he outlined, in considerable detail, the mathematics and engineering considerations of such a venture. Von Braun’s idea was based on a flotilla of spacecraft with colonists moving en masse to Mars, rather than a single spacecraft. It was a bold visionary idea, ahead of its time but a foreshadow of a similar idea that the new rocket-building visionary of our age, Elon Musk, has recently run with.
1. SPACEX’S INTERPLANETARY TRANSPORT SYSTEM
Everything Elon Musk has done up to now has been a lead-up to his ultimate goal of turning human beings into a multi-planetary species. The development of SpaceX’s new rocket technology is central to this. In fifteen years, he’s revolutionized the industry, bringing down the cost of getting into space with his reusable, self-landing rocket stages, as well as completely redefining the electric car, battery and solar panel industries in his spare time. All of this innovation is ultimately aiming to improve life on planet earth, as well as taking us out to the stars.
Musk’s Interplanetary Transport System, which he outlined on stage in 2016, is an outrageous vision to transport large groups of people to Mars and beyond. It’s as much an exploration of the economics of colonizing Mars as it is about the space architecture – how to eventually bring down the cost of a ticket to Mars (and back) and put it within the reach of mere mortals like you – in the hundreds of thousands of dollars rather than the millions. Here’s how it works: a huge carbon-fibre booster will launch a spaceship designed to carry a hundred or more people into orbit. The booster will then return to the launch pad in the manner of the current Falcon 9 rocket and pick up a fuel tank, returning to orbit to fuel the spaceship. And then off you – and hundreds of other ships like it – go. The passenger ships are designed to be as pleasant as possible. There would be a vast cupola-like viewing window at the spacecraft’s tip, behind which there would be a communal open space in which people float around, enjoying doing whatever people do on the way to Mars. Think a luxury liner, rather than a cramped airless capsule. Once on Mars, you won’t need a separate booster to get you off the ground again – with the gravity well being only 38 per cent of Earth’s, the spaceship itself has all the power you need – so long as there is fuel. As this is an interplanetary system, this isn’t just about Mars – trips around the solar system, to the Jovian moon of Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus, are all possible stop-off points too.
It’s a wild futuristic vision, that carries with it a long tradition of wild futuristic visions that have never got beyond the fantasy stage. But Musk, as we know, is a doer as well as a dreamer. So however pie-in-the-sky you think all this might be, he’s a difficult man to bet against.
2. NASA’S JOURNEY TO MARS
NASA’s wants to send astronauts to Mars orbit by the 2030s. Will that happen? Will they be pipped to the post by SpaceX or Blue Origin? Is the political will there? As ever, much of NASA’s direction of travel will be at the whim of the changing American political cycle. What the world will look like next week, let alone in a decade, is anyone’s guess. But at least two crucial parts of the architecture are being built: the SLS heavy-lift rocket and the Orion spacecraft. The first big test of the new Orion spacecraft to the moon (Exploration Mission-1) is slated for 2019. But a trip to Mars and back will require orders of magnitude more work and more sophisticated space hardware development than that. Orion isn’t the vehicle that’s going to get you onto the Martian surface. In the meantime, NASA’s Journey To Mars portmanteau is shifting its emphasis towards NASA’s Deep Space Gateway – using the space between the Earth and the Moon as a proving ground for building and testing new technologies with the goal of a crewed spaceport in lunar orbit. In the meantime, scientific work will continue in low earth orbit on the ISS until as late as 2028.
NASA’s Journey to Mars might not have stalled. It’s just that the route NASA plans to take today will be subject to further changes and diversions. Plan accordingly. As Robert Zubrin points out, how soon we get there boils down to us: ‘Where there’s a will, there’s a way. Where there’s not a will, there’s no way…’
How badly do we want to go? That’s a decision we have to make.
* There is evidence of briny fluids flowing occasionally: for more information, look up ‘recurring slope lineae’.
