WHY I WON'T LIVE TO SEE HUMANS ON MARS AND WHY IT DOESN'T MATTER - An essay

WHY I WON'T LIVE TO SEE HUMANS SETTING FOOT ON MARS AND WHY IT DOESN'T MATTER

AN ESSAY

There is a complex story unfolding here and it is also tied in with the flat-Earthers, moon-landing-deniers and those who cannot understand how we could land on the moon fifty years ago, but not today.

I hope this essay will tie it all together for you.

Firstly, we need to think about why we have not returned to the moon nor gone on to Mars in the last fifty years. When I watched the moon astronauts, on live TV, bunny-hopping around the surface in the nineteen-seventies, like most people at the time, it seemed pretty obvious that there would be a Moonbase or two within a decade and we'd be landing on Mars by the end of the millennium. By today, a Martian colony would be under construction and we'd be mining the moon for minerals and fuel. Why didn't it happen? What caused the delay to what seemed a very reasonable timeline in the nineteen-seventies?

To understand that, we need to go back to that period. Real scientists realised that two- and three-day missions to the moon were not going to advance our knowledge much further and the technology used for those short visits was not sufficient to take us there with the wherewithal to build a Moonbase. So, any plans to repeat the moon landings were scrapped and changes in political regimes meant the cost of manned missions was growing out of control.

It was decided that we needed a reusable spaceship and NASA concentrated on that objective and produced a very creditable machine called the Shuttle. This offered the opportunity to launch more ambitious scientific expeditions including the Hubble space telescope. The Shuttle also provided the opportunity to repair the Hubble – something which could not have been undertaken without the Shuttle and the Hubble would have remained no more than an expensive waste of money (there were distortions in the mirror preventing it working as intended). The knowledge and images produced by Hubble have exceeded all expectations.

As the nineties progressed and flight surgeons began detailed studies of the people who were flying the shuttle, it became apparent that the human body did not do very well in the space environment. Not only that, but the Van Allen belts which protect low-Earth orbit from the harder space radiation, would not be there for deep space missions. While there was no problem dealing with deep space radiation and passing through the Van Allen belts during short duration missions, under a week or thereby, if missions were to be outside the Van Allen belts for longer periods, there would be an effect on the human body and it might be a serious problem.

The deep thinkers at NASA, and Roscosmos (the Russian space agency) realised that we needed to know a great deal more about the effect of microgravity and radiation on humans. That was one of the reasons for building the International Space Station and, guess what, the Shuttle was the ideal vessel to use in its construction.

The result is that we have now had people living on the ISS, continually for eighteen years, doing the most fabulous science and allowing the flight surgeons to learn more about the problems of living in space.

It very quickly became clear that microgravity was a serious problem for mankind's desires to explore.

For instance, if we had set off for Mars in 2000, not knowing what the ISS has taught us during those eighteen years, it would have been a disaster. We now know that food loses its nutrient value in space after a few months, that people who had spent eight months getting to Mars, would be totally unable to move around on the surface owing to muscle and bone wastage. They would have died on the surface of the red planet.

In addition, the huge rockets which would be needed to get into a Mars injection orbit were no longer available. The last Saturn V had flown in the mid-seventies. A whole new 'heavy' booster was needed, preferably partially reusable. The Shuttle system could only get us to low-Earth orbit and the Soyuz had similar constraints. There was no money to develop a replacement for the Saturn V and it wasn't needed anyway, because we couldn't send a mission until we solved the practical problems with manned deep-space flights.