Despite claims by NASA and private outfits such as Mars One, we don’t have the know-how or funding to send people to the Red Planet, according to many scientists, policy experts, and one outspoken lawmaker. “To say we have put the cart before the horse is an understatement,” Rep. Dana Rohrabacher said.
Bryan Versteeg/Mars One
Last week, the nonprofit reality-television project Mars One announced its selection of 100 volunteers who may get one-way tickets to Mars. It's only the latest in decades of celebrated Mars colonization projects. And just like all the rest, this one is unlikely to ever happen, experts say.
"It looks like a scam," John Logsdon, a space policy expert at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., told BuzzFeed News. "They don't have any technology, they don't have any agreements with the space industry. It looks very shaky."
The bigger problem? Mars One's flaws — too few spaceships, nonexistent life-support technologies, not nearly enough money, and, really, no good reason for going — discredit all Mars exploration plans, including NASA's.
Although these hurdles are obvious to everyone in the space industry, politicians have spent decades trumpeting Mars plans, only to cut and run when presented with the bill for their interplanetary adventures.
In Congress, the House science committee sent a bill to the Senate this month, to "make clear that Mars should be NASA's primary goal," according to a committee statement. And in his State of the Union speech last month, President Obama invoked "a re-energized space program that will send American astronauts to Mars."
But all of that is mostly theater, political scientist Alan Steinberg of Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas, told BuzzFeed News.
NASA's budget, adjusted for inflation, has steadily shrunk for decades. And that's because the public and voters don't want Martian cities more than they want stuff on Earth, such as Social Security checks or a Defense Department.
Last year, a National Research Council report on Mars missions came to a similar conclusion. Asked by Congress to come up with one solid rationale for going to Mars, the report panel instead offered a grab bag of vague reasons for blasting off, such as inspiration, industrial goals, and prestige. But those squishy notions won't cut it, not as NASA's buying power continues to plummet, Steinberg said. "Talking about Mars just looks like a way to placate the public while they cut NASA's budget."
NASA / Via nasa.gov
That's when astronomer Percival Lowell claimed, mistakenly, that there were canals — and therefore Martians — on Mars. Sixty years later, the rocket pioneer and former Nazi Werner von Braun wrote a popular series in Collier's magazine outlining how to send 70 men to populate Mars. The idea of Mars landings has been embedded in NASA's mind-set ever since.
Despite decades of Red Planet rhetoric, Congress has never really increased NASA's budget for manned Mars missions. When it comes to Mars, Logsdon said, "there has been a mismatch between aspirations and reality since Nixon."
And now there's Mars One, the Netherlands-based nonprofit that aims, a decade from now, to establish a "permanent human settlement on Mars."
Mars One plans to finance the estimated $6 billion cost of the one-way trip to Mars with donations and through a reality TV show that follows the selection of its volunteer Martians. In crews of four, those colonists would depart in 2024 and 2025, traveling six months in a trailer-sized box to land on the planet and live out the rest of their lives.
But their lives would last only about 68 days, according to a study published last year. "Keeping people alive on Mars is a lot harder problem than most people realize," MIT aerospace engineer Sydney Do, one of the study's authors, told BuzzFeed News.
Mars makes Antarctica look like paradise, with a near vacuum atmosphere, radiation as intense as multiple chest X-rays, temperatures that average -67 degrees Fahrenheit, and toxic chlorinated hydrocarbons carpeting its cratered surface. No technology exists today to survive under these conditions, let alone a human body.
Mars One's engineers say they can overcome those natural barriers with a crew habitat made of six modified SpaceX Dragon space capsules equipped with inflatable greenhouses. The trouble is, according to Do's report, the plants growing the colonists' food would quickly make too much oxygen and suffocate them.
That's just one of many fatal problems. Spare parts, for example, would take up 62% of the mission's supplies. And the colony's intended water supply — H2O baked out of that chlorinated Martian soil — relies on a technology that hasn't been invented yet.
Then there's the expense. The Mars One launch would need 15 interplanetary rockets, nine more than Mars One suggests, the MIT report found. Those rockets, which have yet to be tested, would alone cost $4.5 billion, never mind the cost of habitat modules, developing technologies, and resupply missions. "Mars One is not going to be the one to colonize Mars," Do said.
In response, Mars One CEO Bas Lansdorp told BuzzFeed News that the MIT study "made many wrong assumptions and sub-optimal design solutions." All of the study's critiques "were already taken into account," he wrote by email, and these issues will be addressed in a report in early March. "We hope to have the public report soon after that," Lansdorp said.
Even if Lansdorp is right that MIT's engineers know less about space survival than a reality TV show, plopping people down on Mars to live permanently would only work if they were constantly resupplied at ridiculously expensive costs by a fleet of rockets filled with replacement air purifiers, electronics, and anything else breakable, as well as tons of astronaut chow.
Food, as analyzed in the MIT study, would actually be cheaper to send to Mars than to grow there, even shipped on rockets that cost $300 million a pop, because of infrastructure costs.
For years, SpaceX rocket entrepreneur Elon Musk has talked about a Mars mission that would do just that: constantly launch rockets to resupply a Martian settlement. If they somehow managed to beat the suffocation problem, "people might live for five decades after a landing," Do said. "It's like trying to drive a car for 50 years — you start to need a lot of spare parts to keep things going."
"And at a certain point, you'd have to ask yourself," Do added, "if all I'm doing on Mars is maintenance work in a cave to keep myself alive, why did I even come?"
