Mars and Beyond - Yeah, right…

There has been a bit of talk on the edge of all the other crap these days, about manned missions to Mars. Even President Bush has spouted the rhetoric, stating that it is a goal in the USA to set foot on the Red World.

We’ll never see a manned Mars mission in our lifetimes.

Our retiring space fleet, the shuttle, isn’t even qualified to make it to the moon. The shuttle was designed to put things in orbit, nothing more, so there’s no where near enough shielding in the shuttle to handle the radiation levels found beyond the magnetic field of Earth. If we didn’t have a magnetic field on this planet, the sun’s solar winds would have eroded most of the atmosphere away some time ago. 150 million kilometers from the sun is far too close for our own good without this protection.

For a mission to Mars, we’re going to have to have an overall production system designed of many vehicles carrying materials up off of the planet to the systems and people to build a spacecraft in orbit, rather than lifting off in one shot from the ground. The current International Space Station is a mosquito in mass compared to what would be needed for a Mars run.

We aren’t near the technology needed to build a nuclear powered Bussard ramjet, as there are some obstacles in the way. (This link has a nice little rant from a few on the subject.) So this means a conventional rocket, where you need enough fuel to reach there and back - which means additional mass and a whole series of other problems. Not unworkable, but it will require quite a bit of forethought and very, very careful design.

Again, you’ll need heavy shielding, designed for an extended trip outside of the protective magnetic field of Earth and Mars has no magnetic field for protection once we get there. This equates to more mass for the calculations and a lot more material we need to haul to orbit. Not to mention the myriad of issues surrounding the lander and it’s return to the orbiting spacecraft.

At our current progress in manned space flight and manufacturing materials in space, I would guess that as a species we would have a manned mission to Mars by the year 2287 at the very earliest (see below), but I’d realistically guess far longer yet.

Our track record, frankly, sucks. We’ve only been to the moon a few times, most of our efforts never leave orbit. (See table). Our manned missions have been pathetic considering the near half century of the process and the leaps of general technology in the time given. Not to mention the horrible logistics of building large craft in space. Our current space stations are built on Earth and shipped up in pieces. I don’t know that we’d be able to do that for a Mars capable ship. Maybe so, maybe not. There’s a lot of crap floating between here and there that we’d need to shield for, et cetera. The flimsy structure of a typical space station would never survive the trip.

We haven’t even touched on the monetary cost of it all…

To put the trip itself into perspective, the moon is roughly 386,000 kilometers away and stays that way in respect to us. Mars, at it’s closest point on August 27th, 2003 (the closest it had been in 60,000 years) was roughly 56 million kilometers away - but to make it worse, given that the planets are moving in their own orbits, when we launched a series of probes the actual distance needed to travel to get there was 485 million kilometers. That’s a difference of 1,256 times. It’s the difference between driving a kilometer down to the neighborhood convenience store and driving between Los Angeles and Denver. Then you have to get back again. (More here.) For the record, it will be another 280 years before we’re anywhere near that close again, which is why I predict 2287 at the earliest.

Considering all that you would need to take with you to make a colony (that would have to be self-sustained from the very beginning, as trips to the grocery store are not going to be frequent), perhaps we’d have a full colony on Mars by the year 2800 to 3000.

Note, I said “would”. We’re going to run into resource issues on Earth long before we attain the needed technology to travel in such a way on any level of frequency, so I highly doubt we’ll be able to get off world colonies before we’ve essentially wiped out any chance of our species spreading off of Earth.

Our species was born here and we’ll probably die here, never to expand off world at all.

I would hazard a guess that we have 100-200 years left on this planet before our species is extinct by overpopulation and vanished resources. I’ll give a chance of survival for a few, but population levels will drop to a few million at most and until the planet’s ecosystem recovered, there would be no way to sustain larger populations. Give it 1,000 to 10,000 years until nature fixes things up again (this is a hard one to predict, because nature often surprises us.) If our descendants learn from our mistakes, they may be able to try again and plan things out well enough to colonize other solar planets and perhaps one day reach beyond - but only by carefully managing terrestrial resources from a single command control and like controls on human population levels, could this ever occur. I personally think that I’m being optimistic when I guess that such won’t happen for another 4,000 to 10,000 years - if any humans survive, of course.

In other words, if you’re looking for a manned mission to Mars in your lifetime, I wouldn’t hold your breath for it. We’re a long way off from being able to build the ship needed just to reach Mars with humans aboard, (outside of my prediction of Earthly planetary disaster before we achieve this.)

Certainly we can look at our progress of technology over the last 100 years and make a claim that with our accelerated efforts, we could combat the difficulties of such a trip. However, I’m not making the statements I do in terms of time taken alone, but in terms of accomplishments in that time, compared to the ultimate goals.

In the last 50 years of time, our advances in material sciences and especially computer science have gone from infancy to toddler (perhaps even pre-teen in the computer world.) I have a desktop system sitting next to me right now that would blow away the capabilities of many models of Cray’s supercomputers and has graphic generation hardware on a single AGP card which outperforms SGI’s heavy and large Reality-Engine hardware (the first used for movie special effects) by orders of magnitude. Researchers have finally been able to store data on the orbiting electrons of an individual atom. It won’t be long until the computer science industry reaches it’s teen years and on to adulthood.

Our space program, by comparison, has gone from infant, to infant having its diapers changed. Maybe my point of view is skewed from working in computer science, but the space program stagnated after the Cold War propaganda was no longer required, with almost all efforts going into orbiting communication satellites and an “efficient” way to get them into orbit.

This difference is not merely due to a sluggishness of effort, but partly due to the fact that space exploration is very dangerous for people to undertake. Deep sea diving has far less hazards.

As far as I’m concerned, that we are incapable of building spacecraft in orbit, means that space exploration is not even close to being out of diapers yet. Leaving our terrestrial neighborhood (further out than the moon) with manned flight will be our first crawling efforts. We won’t hit our space program teens until we have manned missions leaving the solar system. Distance traveled is the measure I’m using and we’ve gone nowhere in manned flight. The moon - a big deal for a first effort to extend a hand - is nothing compared to the size of the solar system and too tiny to even matter compared to reaching the edge of our solar system, let alone the closest star outside of Sol.

Think of the scale of distances involved here…Jupiter and Saturn have moons which are as far away from them as we are from the sun! Now try to grasp how far away these planets are from us, then envision Pluto’s distance much, much further out and realize that this is a fraction of the way out to reaching the Ort cloud…which isn’t even the end of Sol’s “bubble” of influence.

By my measure, the space program infant is not even crawling yet! It’s still sitting on it’s butt, reaching out to the one toy near it with a very clumsy hand and throwing a wooden block or two out onto the carpet nearby. 386,000 kilometers. Yawn…

At aphelion (the farthest point of it’s elliptical orbit) Pluto is 49.308 AU’s from the sun (49.308 times the distance of the Earth’s orbit) or roughly 7.38 billion kilometers from the sun (4.59 billion miles for those who prefer it.) That’s roughly 19,000 times further out than the moon is from us and that’s just the last planet. As I said, you have to go much further yet to leave the solar system itself, past the Ort cloud - and the nearest star…38 trillion kilometers, or roughly 9,844,560 times the distance to the moon.

Going back to my car analogy, and switching to English measure, so the metric disabled among us can get a picture of things: claiming victory because our car traversed just one foot to the moon as an absolutely amazing and tremendous accomplishment, is ridiculous. I’m looking at the 3.62 miles left to go just to get outside of the neighborhood. To get to the next neighborhood, we’ve got 1,864.5 miles ahead of us.

Space is just a little bigger than people like to give it credit for.