Will We Live On Mars?

By Jeffrey Kluger

There's probably no special reason to start looking forward to October 2007--unless you're one of the four people who could be traveling to Mars that month. October 2007 is a good time to begin your journey, since right about then, Earth and Mars will be drifting into an alignment that will allow you to make the trip in less than eight months. It's impossible to say what part of Mars you'll be touching down on, but odds are you'll land somewhere near the broad equatorial belt. While temperatures elsewhere on Mars fall to a murderous -220[degrees]F, they can climb to a shirt-sleeve 68[degrees]F in the planet's tropics--not that Mars' thin, toxic air would ever allow you to strip down to your shirt sleeves.

Inhospitable as such a Red Planet redoubt would be, two years after you arrive, another crew will show up, and another two years after that, and another after that. By 2017--about the time that children born this year approach voting age--mankind's first tiny settlement on another world may be taking hold.

Even for a supposedly spacefaring people, dreaming of Mars is dreaming big. Back when Apollo astronauts were routinely bunny-hopping on the nearby moon, Mars seemed like an obvious next goal. But during the past 25 years, the best we've been able to muster has been a few unmanned Martian probes. After the two most recent ones famously flamed out, and after last week's scathing report blaming nasa mismanagement for the failures, even that seems beyond us.

And yet Mars is back on the cosmic itinerary. Scientists at NASA and in the private sector have been quietly scribbling out flight plans and sketching out vehicles that--so they say--could make manned landings on the Red Planet not only possible but also economically practical. The hardware, they believe, is largely in hand. The funds, they argue, could be within reach. "Within 25 years," says NASA's Bret Drake, director of mission studies at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, "I project that we could have human exploration of Mars being conducted routinely."

The key to reaching Mars is doing it smart and doing it cheap. In 1989, during the 20th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing, President Bush challenged NASA to figure out how to put human beings on Mars. The space agency came back with an elephantine 30-year plan that involved construction bays and fuel depots in low-Earth orbit and carried a jaw-dropping price tag of $450 billion.

What drove up the cost of the project was the size of the spacecraft needed to reach Mars, and what drove up the size of the spacecraft was all the fuel and other consumables it would need to carry with it on so long a trip. But while Mars is indeed remote--at its farthest it's 1,000 times as distant as the moon--it has a lot of things the moon doesn't, most notably an atmosphere. And that makes all the difference.

For the past decade--ever since NASA's 1989 proposal laid its half-trillion-dollar egg--the space community has been intrigued by a mission scenario known as the Mars Direct plan. Developed by engineers at Martin Marietta Astronautics, a NASA contractor, Mars Direct calls not merely for visiting the Red Planet but also for living off the alien land.

As early as 2005, when Earth and Mars are in their once-every-26-months alignment, the plan envisions launching a four-person spacecraft to Mars--but launching it with its tanks empty of fuel and its cabin empty of crew. Landing on the surface, the craft would begin pumping Martian atmosphere--which is 95% carbon dioxide--into a reaction chamber, where it would be exposed to hydrogen and broken down into methane, water and oxygen. Methane and oxygen make a first-rate rocket fuel; water and oxygen are necessary human fuels. All these consumables could be pumped into tanks inside the ship and stored there.

Two years later, when Mars and Earth are again in conjunction, another spacecraft--this one carrying a crew--would be sent to join the robot ship on the surface. The astronauts could work on Mars for 18 months, living principally in their arrival craft, and then, at the end of their stay, abandon that ship, climb into the robot craft and blast off for home. "Fly several of these missions," says Robert Zubrin, author of the book The Case for Mars and one of the engineers who developed the plan, "and you leave the surface scattered with a series of warming huts that serve as the beginnings of a base."

What makes the Mars Direct plan remarkable is how unremarkable the science behind it is. The spacecraft in which the astronauts will live are descendants of the same pressurized vessels NASA has been building since the Mercury days. The boosters that will lift the ships off the ground are reconfigured engines cannibalized from the shuttle. The technology needed to distill the Martian atmosphere is the stuff of first-year chemistry texts. For this reason, Zubrin believes, Mars Direct could be surprisingly affordable: about $40 billion for five missions, or less than half the cost of the Apollo program in today's dollars.

But is traveling to Mars on the cheap the best way to go? As the recent failures of NASA's unmanned Mars probes suggest, makeshift machines built with off-the-shelf parts may save money, but when it comes time to fly, they often fall short. At the Johnson Space Center, engineers are thus looking at other Mars scenarios that still include frugal, on-site fuel manufacturing but also call for six-person crews, bigger vehicles and Apollo-style motherships in Martian orbit. "We're trying to take the best ideas and fold them into a reasonable approach," says Drake.

Whichever approach is chosen, what all of them have in common is the speed with which they could be pulled off. Unlike the early Apollo planners, who weren't even sure they could get astronauts into near-Earth space, much less fling them out to the moon, Mars-mission directors have the basic space-travel technology down cold. All they need is the go-ahead to design and build their machines.

Until they get the nod, the Mars partisans have to find ways to keep busy. Research teams from NASA and the Mars Society (a private advocacy group) are conducting expeditions to Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic--a place about as similar to the freeze-dried Martian wasteland as you're likely to find anywhere on Earth--to practice survival skills and exploration techniques. Teams at the Johnson Space Center are refining their mission scenarios and crunching their numbers to keep the costs as low as possible. "For now," says Zubrin, "the only thing between us and Mars is a political decision to go." That kind of hurdle, of course, is often the highest of all.