5/1/2017
Trump has grand plan for mission to Mars but Nasa advises: cool your jets | Science | The Guardian
Trump has grand plan for mission to Mars but
Nasa advises: cool your jets
The president is determined to see Americans walk on Mars during his presidency, but the reality of space
travel is a little more complicated
Alan Yuhas in San Francisco
Sunday 30 April 2017 06.00 EDT
Donald Trump would like to see Americans walk on Mars during his presidency – within three
to seven years, depending on the whims of the voting public. Nasa would love to get there that
quickly, too. The reality of space travel is slightly more complicated.
On Monday, during a call with astronaut Peggy Whitson, who was aboard the International
Space Station, Trump pressed her for a timeline on a crewed mission to Mars, one of Nasa’s
longest standing and most daunting goals.
“Tell me, Mars,” he asked her from the Oval Office, “what do you see a timing for actually
sending humans to Mars? Is there a schedule and when would you see that happening?”
Whitson answered by pointing out that Trump, by signing a Nasa funding bill last month, had
already approved a timeline for a mission in the 2030s. She added that Nasa was building a
new heavy-launch rocket, which would need testing. “Unfortunately space flight takes a lot of
time and money,” she said. “But it is so worthwhile doing.”
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Trump has grand plan for mission to Mars but Nasa advises: cool your jets | Science | The Guardian
Trump replied: “Well, we want to try and do it during my first term or, at worst, during my
second term, so we’ll have to speed that up a little bit, OK?”
It was not clear whether the president meant the remark as a quip or something more serious.
Nasa’s current plan aims for a 2033 launch of a crewed mission to orbit Mars, with a later
mission to land there – just as the Apollo missions circled the moon before touching down.
Even with private partnerships that Trump has encouraged, for instance with Elon Musk’s
SpaceX, getting to Mars will take years.
“With Nasa’s current budget it would be challenging to go to Mars without a massive increase,”
Phil Larson, a former senior adviser for space and innovation to Barack Obama, told the
Guardian. Larson said that Nasa is far more prepared to go to Mars today than it was to go to
the moon in the 1960s, but stressed: “The devil’s in the detail and the devil’s in the funding.”
In the bill last month, Trump and Congress kept most of the agency’s funds intact, at about
$19bn, but cut $200m for climate science, education programs and an asteroid mission that
Nasa had hoped would be a stepping stone to Mars. Although 100 days into his presidency,
Trump has not yet named anyone as Nasa’s administrator. Nasa has estimated that the total
cost of missions to Mars would be hundreds of billions of dollars.
Larson wrote in an op-ed last month that at the rate set by Trump’s budget request, sending
“humans to Mars in less than a decade is not just impossible, it’s laughable”.
Depending on launch timing, it takes seven to nine months simply to reach Mars from Earth –
the Apollo missions to the moon took on average three days – and Nasa has to overhaul its
rockets and spacecraft for such a long mission.
The agency is currently building the most powerful rocket the agency has ever designed, called
the Space Launch System (SLS). On Thursday, the agency pushed back its planned 2018 test
flight to 2019, after a report by the Government Accountability Office cast doubt on the rocket
system’s readiness to fly.
The private spaceflight company SpaceX is also developing a new rocket, the Falcon Heavy,
and has announced an ambitious plan to use it to take two private citizens around the moon in
2018. That rocket also remains untested in flight.
SpaceX’s CEO Musk wants to reach Mars by 2024, but has acknowledged that his private
company would probably need help and luck for that “optimistic” timeline. Any organization,
public or private, needs to solve the challenges of fueling, radiation bombardment, and, if it
wants to land, how to do so safely and with the ability to take off again from the surface of
Mars. The planet’s atmosphere is about 100 times thinner than Earth’s, making descent faster
and more perilous than when astronauts return home.
Deep space is full of hazards to life, and Nasa has said that a crewed mission to Mars and back
could take as long as three years. The agency plans to send a crewed mission into deep space in
the 2020s as a “readiness” gauge – a test of whether it has technology for a long-term space
habitat, protected against effects of radiation and microgravity, which over time weakens
bones, muscles and eyesight. Lockheed Martin, Nasa’s partner for the project, is working
toward a “main base camp” spacecraft for 2028.
Astronauts on a Mars mission will also face psychological tests of extreme isolation and close
quarters whose only comparisons might be the journeys of 16th-century mariners, 19thcentury whalers and the Arctic explorers in centuries past. Space agencies have had several
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Trump has grand plan for mission to Mars but Nasa advises: cool your jets | Science | The Guardian
teams do mock missions for as long as 500 days, and Nasa researchers have stressed that
psychological tests and prep will be key for any crew.
Though the International Space Station has had humans on board for over a decade, it receives
regular supplies and only a handful of people have logged more than 340 continuous days in
space (Whitson holds the US record). A mission to Mars requires food, oxygen, water and fuel
for as much as three times as long. Astronauts who land on the surface would not only need
those resources, they would have to contend with uncertain terrain, high winds and even dust
that could be toxic. And while the moon is sterile, Nasa also does not want to contaminate a
planet where liquid water still flows – nor have Mars contaminate the astronauts.
“We’re absolutely very ready to go to Mars, all of us would be very happy to go,” Whitson told
Trump on Monday. She did not say when.
Topics
Nasa
Mars/Space/Donald Trump/Trump administration/analysis
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