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Dr. Platt

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After months of anticipation, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has at last revealed his plan for making humans a multiplanetary species by sending crews to Mars and beyond.

The announcement, which envisions settlements of up to a million people on Mars by the 2060s, was delivered on September 27 to a packed crowd of aerospace experts at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico.

MARS: A Global Event Series

Excitement for the talk was buoyed in large part by Musk's charisma and SpaceX's impressive track record of backing up its lofty rhetoric with action-particularly with the company's regular cargo missions to the International Space Station and its self-landing, satellite-delivering rockets.

Still, things have not been entirely smooth sailing for SpaceX, with a recent launch pad explosion potentially casting a shadow on their Mars ambitions. And keep in mind that when it comes to human missions to Mars, visions like Musk's have been in the works for quite a while: the last 70 years straight.

The delay is at least in part technical. A trip to the red planet is like visiting an even more inhospitable Antarctica, and its unbreathable atmosphere is less than two percent of what you'd find at Everest's summit. Never mind the fact that you have to fly at least a year, round-trip, to get there in the first place.

National Geographic Channel is currently in production on MARS, a global event series set to premiere November 14. Join the journey at MakeMarsHome.com. #CountdownToMars

And don't even get started on the politics of such an undertaking.

"It's a choice, not an imperative," says John Logsdon, an emeritus professor at George Washington University's Space Policy Institute. "Mars is far away, it's hard to get there, and it costs a lot of money."

But for decades, imaginative engineers and policymakers have dreamt of ways over these hurdles and toward the red planet. Some designs were aimed to inspire; others truly aimed to put boots on the Martian surface. But they all have one thing in common:

They've never left the drawing board.

Disney and the Germans (1947-1957)

The first plausible Mars plan came from an unexpected source: a terrible novel by a brilliant scientist formerly employed the Nazis. In the aftermath of World War II, German rocketeer Wernher von Braun-who'd later design the Apollo mission's Saturn rockets-was essentially commandeered as war booty, kept in the New Mexico desert to perform tests of the German V-2 rocket for the U.S. Army.

In an effort to liven up his days, von Braun researched and wrote The Mars Project, a novel about a manned Mars expedition. "The main idea, I think, was to escape from where he was," says David Portree, an archivist at the U.S. Geological Survey's Astrogeology Science Center and author of Humans to Mars. The novel's detailed technical appendix described a physically plausible series of spacecraft, routes, and even launch dates.

Von Braun called for a mission to Mars in 1985, with ten 4,000-ton ships and 70 crewmates. After a months-long cruise, the fleet would have sent a landing party to the Martian ice caps on gliders equipped with skis. These astronauts then would hike 4,000 miles to build a landing strip near the Martian equator for the rest of the ships.

Editors at Collier's magazine soon became enamored with von Braun's ideas, commissioning a lavishly illustrated article series about the future of space exploration. In 1957, von Braun and former V-2 colleague Ernst Stuhlinger teamed up with Walt Disney for several space-focused episodes of the TV show Disneyland, including one about humans on Mars.

Von Braun's plans-and relentless popularization of them-helped soften up the American public to the idea of space travel. "They created in popular culture the notion that it was realistic," says Logsdon.

NASA's First Plan: Nuclear Rockets (1959-1961)

Barely six months into NASA's official existence, the agency was itching to plan a mission to Mars.

Its first official study served as the outline for NASA's future plans and borrowed heavily from the "von Braun paradigm," though it was much smaller and employed highly efficient nuclear-thermal rockets, which use fission reactors to heat hydrogen into a plasma exhaust.

Photos of Mars Get a Big Yawn (1965)

In 1966, NASA fought hard to send astronauts careening past Mars in 1976. The Joint Action Group (JAG) plan would have sent a four-person crew to Mars and back without landing, equipping them with a 40-inch telescope to scout the surface as they zoomed by.

But new, up-close images of Mars proved to be a buzzkill. The 1965 flyby of NASA's Mariner 4 probe revealed that the planet's barren surface was pockmarked with craters, and that its atmosphere was much thinner than previously thought-ruling out cruising around on a Martian airplane.

Budget deficits, unrest over the Vietnam War, and a disastrous fire on the Apollo 1 launchpad didn't help. Congress declined to fund the JAG program, ultimately scuttling piloted flyby plans by 1968. And the following year, similar tensions struck down a short-lived NASA bid for a "second Apollo" landing-the last Mars plan that von Braun designed.

Buzz Aldrin's Big Plan (1985-present)

In 1985, Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin began working on an elaborate "cycler" Mars mission, which requires two motherships revolving around the sun to routinely intercept Earth's and Mars' orbits. At the mission's peak, this interplanetary bus route would annually ferry batches of astronauts to and from permanent colonies on Mars and Phobos, one of Mars's moons.

If the plan sounds enormous, it is: Aldrin fervently believes that if humans are going to go to Mars, they might as well go big.

"What did we get out of [the Apollo missions' funding]? We landed two people for a day and then brought them back," he says.

"Why do we think that [less] would establish a credible, inspiring mission sequence to Mars?"

But for the foreseeable future, Aldrin's wings are clipped by politics. NASA has a more austere plan, called Journey to Mars, but the details haven't been announced, in large part because such a massive, long-term spending project would require the unlikely support of several successive U.S. presidents.

USSR Down, Mars to Go (1989-1991)

On the twentieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landings, President George H.W. Bush announced his Space Exploration Initiative (SEI), a lofty realignment of NASA's priorities that culminated with boots on the Martian ground by 2019, the 50-year anniversary of Apollo 11.

Though fond of space, Bush never seemed personally invested in the plan. In the months before the announcement, he essentially delegated the White House's space policy to Vice President Dan Quayle and the White House's space advisers, including National Space Council head Mark Albrecht, who fought hard for it.

Yet from the beginning, the plan showed cracks: Disagreements between NASA and the White House totally soured the effort. "There was a fundamental disconnect," says Albrecht. "NASA assumed a blank check but didn't get one," Portree affirms.

By the time the SEI reached Congress, its price tag-conservatively ballparked at an eye-popping $450 billion -alarmed key members of Congress, who spiked the initiative altogether.

Humans to Mars-In 1999! (1990-present)

After Bush's initiative tanked, Mars advocates looked for a cleaner, simpler plan. In other words, why not go to Mars directly?

So they called it Mars Direct. Designed by a pair of aerospace engineers, the plan called for a robotic advance mission to supply the crew's living quarters and vehicles using derivatives of the Martian soil and atmosphere. Humans would then follow, staying some 500 days on the Martian surface before returning home.

Private Money, Public Problems (2010-present)

Without a firm NASA commitment, private entities such as Dennis Tito's Inspiration Mars Foundation, the Planetary Society, and Lockheed Martin have stepped into the fray, laying out Mars missions of their own-with mixed results.

But many have derided Mars One as a fool's errand-and perhaps a scam. One analysis suggests that the colonists likely would starve, and questions about the organization's finances continue to undermine its credibility.

Journey to Mars (2014-present)

As SpaceX and other private companies jostle for a decades-long Martian payday, NASA continues to tout its agency-wide "Journey to Mars" initiative.

The plan, detailed in late 2015, breaks down the technologies and stepping-stones needed to get humans safely to Mars and back again-amounting to a flexible, and somewhat vague, "Evolvable Mars Campaign."

And NASA is steadily chipping away at the problems Mars poses: The agency and a bevy of private contractors are busy developing the tech for a Martian trek, such as the Orion crew capsule and the Space Launch System rocket. In fact, NASA baked the red planet into its recent astronaut recruitment, saying that the job postings were "in preparation for the agency's journey to Mars."

But today's bright-eyed astronaut applicants should probably check their expectations for a voyage to the red planet.

For one, even at its most aggressive, the Journey to Mars won't culminate with boots on the ground until the 2030s-a timetable recognized by NASA and Congress, which is poised to legally bind the agency to send humans to Mars. The most ambitious near-term venture on the books? An oft-criticized plan that would send astronauts into lunar orbit to study a boulder robotically plucked from an asteroid.

Most importantly, it's an open question if a decades-long Mars project could maintain broad political support and funding in the U.S., even if it relied on international partners or private collaborators such as SpaceX.

"When Kennedy said 'go to the moon,' he'd already been told that it was possible by 1967-and he fully expected to be president then," says Logsdon. "One presidential administration is different than doing [a Mars mission] over five or six."

But that won't stop would-be astronauts from dreaming big.

After all, says Logsdon, "it's what space people do."

Editor's Note: This story is an updated version of a 2015 article.

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SpaceX Wants to Go to Mars. Here's Why Humans Aren't There Yet.

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After months of anticipation, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has at last revealed his plan for making humans a multiplanetary species by sending crews to Mars and beyond. The announcement, which envisions settlements of up to a million people on Mars by the 2060s, was delivered on September 27 to a packed crowd of aerospace experts at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico.

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Dr. Platt

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A mission to Mars could take a toll on astronauts' bodies, including their eyes.

Credit: ESA

Sending humans to Mars by the 2030s is affordable, a group of experts finds, but some key changes are needed if it is going to happen.

A workshop group of more than 60 individuals representing more than 30 government, industry, academic and other organizations has found that a NASA-led manned mission to Mars is feasible if the space agency's budget is restored to pre-sequestration levels. Putting the first humans on the Red Planet would also require international cooperation and private industry support.

There is a growing consensus among the space community that a manned mission to Mars should be a priority worth working toward in the coming years, according to Chris Carberry the executive director of Explore Mars Inc., the organization that hosted the workshop with the American Astronautical Society. [ 5 Manned Mission to Mars Ideas]

"To be able to make it feasible and affordable, you need a sustainable budget," Carberry told SPACE.com. "You need a budget that is consistent, that you can predict from year to year and that doesn't get canceled in the next administration."

Budget issues

While Carberry said that it is possible to launch a manned mission to Mars by the 2030s under pre-sequestration budget levels, a NASA-led human mission to Mars will probably never launch under current budgetary constraints, Carberry said.

"We're not far off from what we need," Carberry said. "We just need to get back into a reasonable budget, which we're not in right now."

President Barack Obama requested about $17.7 billion for NASA during his 2013 budget proposal, $59 million less than what the space agency received in 2012.

"[NASA] funds are divided between various missions, directorates and centers," Carberry said via email. "Unless there was a MAJOR restructuring, it would be hard to accomplish a NASA-led Mars mission [under the current budget]. That said, major disruptive technology gains could always occur that could make it viable - we just can't count on that happening."

From now until the 2030s

The workshop group's plan hinges partially upon the availability of NASA's heavy-lifting rocket, the Space Launch System, and the space agency's deep space crew capsule, the Orion spacecraft. SLS and Orion are both in development now, with Orion's first unmanned test flight slated for later this year.

In December 2013, attendees affiliated with NASA, Boeing, Orbital Sciences Corp. and many others at the Affording Mars Workshop arrived at six agreements that could frame the way that space agencies work toward a manned mission to Mars. They are:

The goal of sending humans to Mars is affordable with the right partnerships (international, commercial/industrial, intergovernmental, etc.), commitment to efficiency, constancy of purpose and policy/budget consistency.

Human exploration of Mars is technologically feasible by the 2030s.

Mars should be the priority for human spaceflight over the next two to three decades.

Between now and 2030, investments and activities in the human exploration of space must be prioritized in a manner that advances the objective of initial human missions to Mars beginning in the 2030s.

Utilizing the International Space Station, including international partnerships, is essential for human missions to deep space.

Continuation of robotic precursor missions to Mars throughout the 2020s is essential for the success of human missions to Mars.

Carberry said that the experts are still not sure whether a long or short mission to the Red Planet would be best when launching the first manned mission to Mars.

Getting to Mars

As a model of international collaboration and a huge undertaking in space, the International Space Station (ISS) could provide vital lessons about getting humans to Mars, Carberry said. The space station mission, which has been newly extended through 2024, is the best example of a consistent budget set forth for a huge project in space, he added.

"The only reason it [the International Space Station] has survived the years is because it's an international mission," Carberry said. "It is held together by international treaties and strong agreements ... If we were to follow that model and maybe even move on with the partnership to the next step, that perhaps could be the greatest legacy of ISS because that's a proven model of sustainability, because you have more holding it together than just that annual cycle." [ 7 Biggest Mysteries of Mars ]

The $100 billion orbiting outpost could also be used to mimic parts of a mission to the Red Planet. Engineers could use the orbiting laboratory to demonstrate telerobotics and new spacesuits, and to work out possible problems that could arise on a trip to Mars.

Bridge mission

The workshop group also explored the idea of a mission that would bridge the space station and a manned mission to Mars. Agencies should consider such a bridge mission when moving forward toward a launch date in the 2030s, the workshop found.

The bridge mission could be anything from NASA's ambitious plan to capture an asteroid and bring it into lunar orbit where astronauts could explore it, to a small and temporary station where astronauts can learn a little more about fending for themselves while in space.

Space.com Exclusive T-shirt. Available to Populate Mars. Buy Now

Credit: Space.com Store

"When they're on ISS, they communicate [with Earth] every day - they can barely do anything without communicating with Mission Control," Carberry said. "They need to get out of the habit of that, and they know that."

Other missions

Private companies are planning their own trips to the Red Planet. Mars One is planning on sending a group of people to colonize the planet on a one-way mission in 2022. The company is also expected to send a lander to Mars in 2018.

The Inspiration Mars mission, now slated to launch in 2021, will launch a couple on a flyby of Mars. This private mission might be a good precursor mission before a full Martian landing, according to Carberry.

"There's an interesting window in 2021 where they would flip by Venus, which is relatively interesting itself," Carberry said. "If you have a crewed mission flying by Venus on the way to Mars, that's pretty impressive."

If the Inspiration Mars mission does launch in 2021, it may help scientists put human boots on Martian dirt by the 2030s, Carberry said.

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Manned Mission to Mars By 2030s Is Really Possible, Experts Say

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Sending humans to Mars by the 2030s is affordable, a group of experts finds, but some key changes are needed if it is going to happen. A workshop group of more than 60 individuals representing more than 30 government, industry, academic and other organizations has found that a NASA-led manned mission to Mars is feasible if the space agency's budget is restored to pre-sequestration levels.

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Dr. Platt

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How feasible are Elon Musk's plans to settle on Mars? A planetary scientist explains

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Mars is the future. It's after all NASA's current overarching goal to send humans to the Red Planet. But even as early as the 1950s, aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun, had published his vision of a mission to Mars in his ...

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Dr. Platt

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Touching down here feels like landing on Mars.

Clay-colored lava rocks form football field-sized craters visible from my airplane window. Residences near the airfield are low-slung, white, and identical in shape, just like the space colonies in science fiction. There are 800 or so mostly British and U.S. citizens residing on this 33 square-mile island, which sits just south of the equator, about half way between South America and Africa. Hundreds of satellites pepper the craters, listening to U.S. test missiles, space junk, and things that are classified.

I deboard the military charter plane and walk down the U.S. Air Force's Wideawake Airfield under a cloudless sky. I am over 1,000 miles from any continent. It's hard to imagine that scientists from another century chose to build the planet's first artificial ecosystem here.

Like No Other Place on Earth

Rock and blinding sun overpower my senses. While waiting with two-dozen fellow civilians for passport stamps, Lyndon Smith, an elderly British visitor, points to the tripod slung across my shoulders.

"She once wept here," he says quietly, pointing toward his wife. "There's no release from the sun. Are you out here to take pictures?" I nod in response.

Charles Darwin popularized the stigma about Ascension Island that Smith and many others are repeating almost 200 years later. Darwin called the island "hideous." He stopped here en route to England from the lush Galapagos on his famous voyage on the HMS Beagle. Darwin lamented in his journal that this inhospitable place occupied by the British military should be made into a "productive spot." Darwin called the landscape "burnt" and "completely destitute of trees." To be fair, there was one solitary tree.

If Galapagos was Charles Darwin's Eden, Ascension was his Inferno.

Darwin developed names to describe the island's inferno-like rock formations: Devil's Riding School, Devil's Ashpit, and Broken Tooth. Those names have stuck. I pick up a hand-drawn driving map in the open-air immigration area. I count six roads, forty-four volcanic peaks, and five features still containing the word "devil."

I walk toward a concrete patio filled with strewn baggage when a sliver of green reaching over 2,000 feet in height catches the corner of my eye. The peak stands in stark contrast to the Mars-like landscape around me. This artificially green mountaintop is the reason I'd come. I'd spent months wondering: What can we learn from this place?

Despite being visited by only a few thousand people each year, this mountain has become the poster child for "human-made" or "novel" ecosystems worldwide. The aptly named Green Mountain is one of the most cited and debated examples for the phenomena of wholly new combinations of species, with no historical equivalent, that assemble through human intervention.

If we indeed want to figure out how to green Mars and settle there, this mountaintop forest surrounded by a volcanic moonscape is our scientific starting point.

A Forgotten, Island-sized Experiment

Darwin first suggested engineering a new environment on Ascension. But Sir Joseph Hooker, a younger Victorian-era botanist, would take action. He embarked on a fifty-year experiment that would disrupt the island's landscape and ecology. Archivists would later find in Hooker's journal that, as an old man, he expressed regret for the whole endeavor. He predicted the tragic impact it would have a century later.

Young Hooker was eager, in 1843, to make his mark on science after years of sleeping with Darwin's manuscripts under his pillow. He shipped 330 plants from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew to Green Mountain before the middle of the century. By 1870, 5,000 more trees had been planted. Anecdotal records report that greater rainfall soon followed these plantings (a point disputed by lack of reliable weather measurement).

With time, the soil changed, as did the island's hydrology. The Royal Admiralty, the project's early financiers, reported conditions more hospitable for its troops stationed on Ascension Island. All thanks to the plants.

I visit Ascension's famous Dew Pond. By the 1880s, Hooker's "mist-catching trees" had formed a small pond at the mountain's summit, the island's first freshwater water body. Today, bamboo trunks form a 40-foot tall wall around the pond, knocking together harmoniously in the breeze.

A life-sized, plastic crocodile waits half-submerged in the pond with teeth showing. The faux reptile appeared there in the 1990s as a gag. It quickly developed its own mythology among the military residents. Should they remove the item? Or leave it? No one can agree what to do with it now. The same can be said about the artificial ecosystem all around.

Hiking down from the pond, along the ridge of Green Mountain, I notice striking similarities between the lush forest around me and the "natural" cloud forests I'd visited in Costa Rica. Scientists deemed the biological transformation on Ascension's peak so unprecedented that, in the late 1990s, they borrowed a term from science fiction- terraforming -just to describe what was happening.

Newly digitized letters reveal the remarkable extent of Hooker's experiment. Sparrows, chaffinches, linnets, and several coastal African birds arrived to the island in 1863. Orchards of oranges, lemons, cherimoyers, custard apples, and lychees were planted by 1868. But not everything flourished. The orange trees withered. Hooker's botanical plantings waned into the 1890s and only the fittest non-native plants survived. The surviving mash-up of flora from Africa and the Americas ran untended for most of the 1900s.

The experiment became a historical footnote. But in the early 2000s it resurfaced smack in the middle of a new scientific vocabulary around "novel ecosystems." What long-term value do human-made ecosystems have, whether intentional or accidental? How do they work?

An Accidental Key to the Future

As plans advance for human settlements on Mars, more and more people seek answers from this mountain. For example, in 2004, evolutionary biologist David Wilkinson used Green Mountain to illustrate that snail-speed coevolution is not always necessary for complex ecosystems to build themselves. Sometimes things can happen quickly, chaotically, by just fitting together.

Terraforming Mars may require evolutionary insights like this about random species assembling, competing, and cooperating in strange, new places.

Novel ecosystems are popping up around the globe on terms much more accidental than Green Mountain. One researcher estimated that up to 35 percent of undeveloped lands near cities and farms may soon be covered with these novel systems.

In 2008, Dox Sax of Brown University co-authored a paper that found plant diversity had doubled on five remote islands and island chains because of accidental biological invasions. Yet almost no extinctions of local plants and animals had occurred. Sax believes Green Mountain is therefore "at the nexus of issues we'll all be wrestling with for years to come: novel as opposed to historic communities, the role of non-natives in providing ecosystem services, and what our conservation goals should be."

Sax believes evolutionary relationships are forming atop Green Mountain that could be wholly different from ones that work on long timelines in "pristine" places. Pristine place are where scientists traditionally flock.

Dan Simberloff of the University of Tennessee says that studying Ascension Island could help us learn not just about Mars, but also how to green Earth's deserts and feed more people. He and Sax agree that more research is needed on novel ecosystems. Yet neither of the men has managed a research trip to Ascension Island. Non-military travel to the island is expensive. Accommodations are limited. Unlike the Galapagos, where evolutionary biologists arrive in the hundreds each year, visiting scientists are generally a rarity on Green Mountain.

The Real-life Botanists of "Mars"

Stedson Stroud, with nothing more than an 8th grade education, knows more about Ascension's plant life than anyone today. He picked up where Hooker left off.

Stroud always carries a walking stick and ties his hair back in a long, curly ponytail. Stroud came to this island as a teenager in the early 1960s. He has seen the island change. A descendent of Chinese, African, and Indian laborers, he is a "Saint"-someone born on Ascension's much-larger sister island of St. Helena. He points to a sign for Old NASA Road on our first drive together to Green Mountain.

"I was the janitor when they were relaying the first Apollo radio transmissions from this island," he says. "My job was to keep the coffee supplied throughout the night." He smiles behind a thick, black mustache.

We stop at the Royal Air Force base for snacks and water. Desalinated water spouts from the fountains and Mars bars pile next to the register. Green Mountain's orchard and dew pond no longer serve the basic survival needs of residents.

We roar up thirty switchbacks in Stroud's canvas-top Jeep with a faded decal on the side. It reads: Conservation Department. The air gets noticeably cooler. On average, Green Mountain is 7°C cooler than where resident live in the lowlands. Wild sheep and bright orange land crabs dart to the banks.

"The sheep look thin," I comment. "They look healthier than earlier this year," says Stroud. In addition to being Green Mountain National Park's only ranger when I visited, Stroud is considered the island's unofficial veterinarian. I would soon learn that those two jobs are at odds here on Ascension Island.

When a wild lamb was found motherless in 2015, Stroud recruited two island residents, Carla and Jeff Smith, to take her in. Chloe is now a grown sheep that lives very much like a dog. She roams inside a fenced yard, drinks filtrated water from a bottle, and rides in the back seat of a BMW. Chloe isn't alone. There is a nascent but growing culture of feral donkey and sheep "adoptions" among the residents as the community and invasive animals try to survive together in this harsh environment. Besides, it's better that way for the plants found only on Ascension.

I follow Stroud to the restoration site of Euphorbia origanoides, a diminutive shrub on the brink of extinction. It's miles away and only accessible by foot. We pass sandy beaches pocketed by last night's laying of turtle eggs. Seawater spouts over 15 feet in the air, like a geyser, through a unique coastal rock formation. I spot a dozen sea turtle heads bobbing in the turquoise surf.

After a mile of barren lowlands, we near a fenced paddock. I spot a handful of tire-sized rock circles on the ground. One is shaped like a heart. At the center of each is a stump, grazed to an inch from the ground. They are the mourned remains of a once hopeful out-planting of Euphorbia origanoides. Inside the paddock, the plants are still safe from sheep and rabbits.

Non-native sheep, much like the island's non-native plants, threaten the things Stroud cares most about: the island's last surviving endemic plants.

Ten plants discovered by Hooker and colleagues are found only on this island. Three are now thought to be extinct. Outmuscled by Hooker's plants and sailors' livestock, the remaining seven are among the most threatened plants in the world. "We're in a race against time," says Stroud.

Rediscovery on Ascension Island

I ask Stroud to show me the place and plant he calls "the loves of my life." It takes a half hour of sliding on our buttocks down steep banks blanketed by meter-tall African grasses.

Stroud bounds ahead. I and two part-time park volunteers from the U.S. Air Force base slog behind, sore and muddy. Stroud walks to a rocky pinnacle and hands me a fraying nylon rope. We do a repelling-like leap to a ledge that, clearly, no sheep can reach. He points to seven tiny individuals, about the size of a four-leaf clover, of the once-lost Annogramma ascensionis -the Ascension Island parsley fern.

Stroud made international headlines in 2009 when he rediscovered the last three individuals of this species at this very site. Since then, almost a million dollars has been collectively invested in cultivating and reintroducing a viable population.

"It was better than finding gold," says Stroud. Biodiversity aside, the plant had political value.

Green Mountain had long been evoked among scientists as a talking point about evolution. History buffs would visit for its historical affiliation with Darwin and terraforming. Finding the extinct Ascension Island parsley fern shifted the conversation about this novel ecosystem towards topics of conservation and renewal.

Both Hooker and Stroud are conflicted botanists. Hooker predicted-and regretted-the extinction of Ascension's unique ferns, which he saw as vital keys to our understanding of island evolution. Stroud stewards the terraformed landscape while simultaneously investing in heavy-handed management projects to save the remaining endemic species. He references their cultural value to South Atlantic islanders.

The island has one endemic bird, the Ascension frigatebird, which was saved from near extinction after a multi-million dollar, decade-long effort that eradicated feral cats from the island. I ask Stroud if he favors a similar effort for Green Mountain. Perhaps mow down the forest and focus wholly on traditional conservation of endemics plants.

Stroud pauses, "At this point, I fear we've too far gone for [that]. We need to focus on coexistence."

Lessons in Coexistence, Not Conservation

Green Mountain's shady slopes have only one residence, a stately concrete mansion reserved for the Londoners who serve term positions as Island Administrator. A bride and groom borrow its manicured grounds for a wedding ceremony my last Saturday there. I watch the groom harvest non-native ginger leaves from the summit and decorate the alter. The wedding photographer poses the newlyweds in the shade with a lush, forested backdrop. Children in bright dresses jump off 200-year-old canons onto cool Bermuda grass.

"How we think about non-native plants has changed in the past decade," says Sax. "Drastically so."

Some scientists now say we ought to make peace with the novel ecosystems around us. And better understand what they provide us. Others, of course, push back.

How do we reconcile the norms of traditional conservation and the reality around us? In the minds of Ascension Islanders, there seems to be little controversy.

"If I could snap my fingers and return the mountain to its original state, would I? Probably not," says Drew Avery, president of the Ascension Island Heritage Society. Avery argues that many island residents have no knowledge that the forested landscape on Green Mountain is not "natural"-the way things were before human beings arrived.

There's another reason why mowing down Green Mountain's trees is off the table: some might be capable of rescuing the remaining endemic individuals being obliterated by the expanding forest.

Bullied out of their home rooted in the ground, the plants Pteris adscensionis and Xiphopteris ascensionense have found refuge in the novel ecosystem's canopy. Thriving in the moist, sponge-like mosses that grow on the branches of the cape yew and white olive trees, a small population of ferns that spent thousands of years on the ground are popping up into the air. Are they actually adapting and thriving? It's too early to tell.

Stroud has turned traditional conservation on its head by facilitating the fern's canopy survival hack in the cape yew trees. He's planting more of the trees once considered so problematic. This strategy is unorthodox but showing promise. It is part of the island's Biodiversity Action Plan designed in 2012 to reconcile with the changing landscape.

After years as the first and only conservation officer, in 2016, Stroud worked as part of an eleven person, full-time conservation staff. The team includes Ascension native Natasha Williams and a younger generation of Saints, like Jolene Sim, who left St. Helena like Stroud to start a life on Ascension. Their traditional knowledge of St. Helena's plants has found a new, urgent use on this South Atlantic sister island.

"We grew up and are used to the terrain that is here and St. Helena, so it's quite natural for us to be walking on these [cliffs] and be clambering about," says Sim, the deputy head of conservation who has been working on a massive repopulation effort of the once-lost Ascension parsley fern. In February of 2015, the clambering paid off.

Sim and a collaborator from Kew Royal Botanical Gardens discovered 170 new sporophytes-the next generation of parsley ferns-on a rocky ledge where they had placed their hopes. She had also placed, with tweezers, seven nursery-reared ferns months earlier.

"We were surprised," Sims recalls. "We didn't expect such big success from just seven initial plants."

This kind of reintroduction is a more traditional approach to plant restoration than Stroud's canopy creation. But both are part of a larger portfolio approach to biodiversity conservation that the on-island staff has spent years developing in collaboration with off-island scientists.

Theirs is a do-what-you-can-and-see-what-works strategy that seems to be helping a conservation landscape where, seemingly, few ecological rules apply.

Together, Sim and Stroud picked out this ledge on a steep, mist-covered cliff where the descendants of nursery-reared parsley ferns now attempt a species come back. Conservation Department staff commonly refer to this spot as Stedson's Ledge.

"It's nice to have my name there," comments Stroud, who was about to turn 70 years old when I visited. "But, really, it will be Jolene and the others who will continue this fight for our endemic plants long after I'm gone."

Planting Again

On my last day on Ascension Island, the mist that had perpetually covered the summit of Green Mountain momentarily lifts. Five U.S. Air Force airmen and airwomen arrive in casual clothes with a visiting sergeant. They walk down the muddy path to a fenced area where Stroud is waiting, two shovels in hand. To commemorate the sergeant's visit, Stroud has invited him to plant a ceremonial tree to contribute to this effort of creating a large cape yew canopy, where the last endemic ferns might persist. The sergeant lifts the sapling from the pot and kneels down. Photos are snapped.

To me, it's a strange sight. The purposeful planting of non-native trees, just like Hooker did, is an act that got us all into this whole novel ecosystem mess centuries ago. Is this the right path forward for Green Mountain-or for other novel ecosystems?

After the planting, Stroud and I are alone. The mist begins to roll back over the mountaintop.

Green Mountain has become a metaphor, parable, and talking point for scientists. Among conservationists, it's used to debate ethics. But few people ask Stroud, the daily caretaker, what this place teaches him about the future direction of conservation. So I ask.

"I am now extending Hooker's forest, of large mist-interception trees, as a survival tactic for these ferns to grow on," he says. "If we stand by and do nothing, then we will be rightly condemned by future generations."

Stroud picks a few wild but non-native raspberries. He hands them to me as we walk back toward his Jeep. They're tart and delicious.

I scribble in my notepad on our ride down the mountain: "If you can't save everything the way it used to be, save what you can the way it is now."
Reporting for this story was supported by a grant from the Fund for Environmental Journalism, a program of the Society for Environmental Journalists. Author's note: Stedson Stroud retired from the Conservation Department in May 2016. He has since returned to his native island where he continues to look for the two lost plant species of St. Helena. Jolene Sim now leads plant conservation efforts on Ascension Island.

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Mysterious Terraformed Island Offers New Clues to Life's Survival

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A 150-year-old effort on the remote Ascension Island in the Atlantic may help us green Mars. Can it also help us save Earth?

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Dr. Platt

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Photo illustration by Juliana Jiménez Jaramillo

In February of 1960, the American magazine Look ran a cover story that asked, "Should a Girl Be First in Space?" It was a sensational headline representing an audacious idea at the time. And as we all know, the proposal fell short. In 1961, NASA sent Alan Shepard above the stratosphere, followed by dozens of other spacemen over the next two decades. Only in 1983 did Sally Ride become America's first female astronaut to launch.

But why would anyone think a woman would be the first to space, anyway? Medical studies, for one thing. Some studies in the 1950s and '60s suggested female bodies had stronger hearts and could better withstand vibrations and radiation exposure. Moreover, psychological studies suggested that women coped better than men in isolation and when deprived of sensory inputs.

Some of these investigations were limited in their design and sample sizes. But there was another, more compelling reason that women might outshine men as potential astronauts: basic economics. Thanks to their size, women are, on average, cheaper to launch and fly than men. As a NASA guinea pig, I had the chance to verify this firsthand.

Last year I took part in a NASA-funded research project called HI-SEAS ( Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation). It required that I and five other crewmembers live as astronauts on the surface of Mars. We didn't leave Earth, obviously, but for four months we were cooped up in a geodesic dome on the side of the very red, very rocky, very Mars-like Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii. Our food, water, power, and communications were limited, and we were only allowed to exit the habitat if we wore mock spacesuits. So many Martian hassles, so little glory.

Courtesy of Sian Proctor

This was the first HI-SEAS mission-a third starts this month-and it was designed mainly to study the types of food Mars explorers might eat. I was the crew writer, blogging for and the , and since I had the scientific background and interest, I conducted a sleep study, too.

I collected and managed the crew's sleep data over the course of the experiment. One device we used to track sleep was the sensor armband from BodyMedia, which also provides estimates of daily and weekly caloric expenditure. While I didn't know which data belonged to which subject due to anonymity requirements, I could see each subject's sex. Over time I noticed a trend.

Week in and week out, the three female crew members expended less than half the calories of the three male crew members. Less than half! We were all exercising roughly the same amount-at least 45 minutes a day for five consecutive days a week-but our metabolic furnaces were calibrated in radically different ways.

During one week, the most metabolically active male burned an average of 3,450 calories per day, while the least metabolically active female expended 1,475 calories per day. It was rare for a woman on crew to burn 2,000 calories in a day and common for male crew members to exceed 3,000.

We were only allowed to exit the habitat if we wore mock spacesuits. So many Martian hassles, so little glory.

The data certainly fit with my other observations. At mealtime, the women took smaller portions than the men, who often went back for seconds. One crew member complained how hard it was to maintain his weight, despite all the calories he was taking in.

The calorie requirements of an astronaut matter significantly when planning a mission. The more food a person needs to maintain her weight on a long space journey, the more food should launch with her. The more food launched, the heavier the payload. The heavier the payload, the more fuel required to blast it into orbit and beyond. The more fuel required, the heavier the rocket becomes, which it in turn requires more fuel to launch.

Every pound counts on the way to space. NASA was keenly aware of this, and that's why in the early 1960s it nearly considered a female astronaut corps. Of course, politics and culture have a pesky way of sneaking into engineering decisions, especially when a country's pride is on the line, according to Margaret A. Weitekamp, author of Right Stuff, Wrong Sex: America's First Women in Space Program. Despite extensive training and excellent performance, the women in the program were dismissed. Some of the reasons included fears about public relations if female astronauts were killed, as well as NASA's reliance on military pilots, who at the time were only male.

The first woman in space was cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova of the Soviet Union, who flew 20 years before Sally Ride. Her flight bolstered the appearance of communist egalitarianism during the Cold War. Russia hasn't kept up a female presence in orbit, though; it only just last month launched its first female cosmonaut in almost two decades, Elena Serova.

Photo by Sovfoto/UIG via Getty Images

Back to Mars. According to Robert Zubrin, aerospace engineer, author, and president of the Mars Society, a round-trip mission to Mars could cost as little as $30 billion. While this is a low-ball estimate that ignores many of the details, it suggests that a manned Mars mission might not cost $450 billion, an amount proposed by NASA in 1989 that many believe is close to the upper limit for such a mission. Many of today's estimates tend to be around $100 billion.

To put these price tags in perspective, the Curiosity rover cost $2.5 billion. And while Curiosity is an impressive feat of engineering that is collecting and analyzing more of Mars than any robot before, its capabilities as an explorer pale in comparison to that of a human crew. In mere hours, a trained geologist could spot a rock that fills in gaps of solar system formation theory. Such a significant discovery could take a rover weeks, months, or years, if ever. Admittedly, though, rovers also have the benefit of running on plutonium dioxide and never needing to defecate. A manned Mars mission requires designing for the burdens of having a body.

Photo by Apic/Getty Images

In the early 2000s, Alan Drysdale, a systems analyst in advanced life support and a contractor with NASA, was thinking about the problem of astronaut bodies. He turned to a NASA document on physiological metrics called STD-3000, Man-Systems Integration Standards (now revised to STD-3001), which details needs and effluents for a range of body types. The STD-3000 gave the stats for women whose size was in the fifth percentile to men sized in the 95 th percentile, a range from about 4-foot-11 and 90 pounds to 6-foot-3 and 215 pounds. He crunched the numbers.

Drysdale found that a fifth-percentile woman would use less than half the resources of a 95 th-percentile man. While we didn't have a woman on the HI-SEAS crew who was in the fifth percentile, our stats were similar to the predictions.

Drysdale, who no longer works with NASA, is emphatic that the space agency wastes money and doesn't consider cost-saving approaches like a Mars crew of smaller astronauts. He says his calculations suggest all things being equal, such a crew would launch for half the payload cost. "Small women haven't been demonstrated to be appreciably dumber than big women or big men, so there's no reason to choose larger people for a flight crew when it's brain power you want," says Drysdale. "The logical thing to do is to fly small women."

Harry Jones, of NASA Ames Research Center, says that he too noticed the average female and male calorie requirement differed significantly and published on the topic in the early 2000s. "For a Mars mission, life support will be a major cost," he says. "It is expected that oxygen and water can be recycled, but not food. Reducing the crew's calorie requirement would cut cost."

Indeed, a number of people I talked to acknowledged the benefits of an all-female crew, or even just a crew made of smaller people in general. One proponent is Andrew Rader, a mission integrator at SpaceX. "Anything to reduce weight and even in terms of making the spacecraft seem bigger, having smaller astronauts would be great," he says, noting that he isn't speaking on behalf of his company. "I think it's a reasonable proposal."

As reasonable as an all-female Mars mission is from an economic perspective, some might find the idea offensive. After all, it'd be an expedition that fails to represent half the world's population; an all-female Mars crew would strike many as exceptionally biased.

Then again, space-mission design has always been biased in one way or another. Exploration in general is nothing if not political, dictated by the people with the money and power to choose the face of the expedition. Right now, it's unlikely that those with the power to do so would agree to fund a crew of small female astronauts even to save money.

And at this stage of predesign research for Mars, many who work with NASA believe selecting the right people for a mission is more nuanced than simply calculating size and resource requirements. "It's not really politically correct to mention that size, body type, gender, intelligence, agility, emotional structure, education, and other individual differences might all affect the cost-benefit equation in astronaut selection," says Jones. "Really, the issues are all about crew performance including group dynamics, individual psychology, etc."

Crew cohesion was an important subject of study during the HI-SEAS mission last year. My six crew members and I were chosen out of 700 applicants worldwide. We were a relatively diverse bunch: a Belgian man, a Canadian man, a Russian-American man, a Puerto Rican woman, a black woman who grew up in the Northeast, and me, a white woman from Kansas. We had a range of engineering, science, and creative backgrounds. For half of us, English wasn't our first language.

Because of our differences, we were often learning and relearning each other's problem-solving approaches, personalities, language quirks, and food preferences. But soon we realized that our diversity helped us solve various problems that came up, from designing new scientific experiments and analyzing data to building equipment to finding ingredient substitutions for recipes.

This was also the experience of astronaut So-yeon Yi, South Korea's first and only astronaut, who flew to the International Space Station in 2008. On being in a diverse group, she told me: "At first it's hell, but in the long term, diversity is very good. It's because uniform people in a team may be comfortable, but they can't know what they don't know."

Soyeon Yi, who is 5-foot-4, said she didn't feel as cramped in the space station as the cosmonauts who were more than 6 feet tall. They were envious of her freedom of movement, she said. But she also stressed that she'd rather be in a diverse group than one that's too similar.

Based on my HI-SEAS experience, I tend to agree. Still, if the bottom line is what matters in getting to Mars, the more women the better.

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The First Mission to Mars Should Be Manned With All Women

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In February of 1960, the American magazine Look ran a cover story that asked, "Should a Girl Be First in Space?" It was a sensational headline representing an audacious idea at the time. And as we all know, the proposal fell short.

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Dr. Platt

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Colonising Mars will be as much a challenge of psychology as engineering. Photograph: Denis Scott/Corbis

Since April, thousands of people have applied to take a one-way trip to Mars. Following further stages of selection and training, the plan is for the first four astronauts to lift off in 2022. After a seven-month journey they will settle permanently on the red planet to conduct scientific experiments and do whatever it takes to survive. Meanwhile, the rest of us will be able to watch their lives unfold on reality TV.

The Mars One programme is daring but is it realistic? Nasa is sceptical about a private one-way mission and instead plans to send more rovers followed by a manned return mission sometime in the 2030s. Others have questioned Mars One's business model, technical feasibility and the health risks posed by radiation.

On top of these concerns, Martian colonists will face extreme psychological conditions. Mars One claims to have discussed its plans "with experienced and respected psychologists" but doesn't name them or refer to any supporting evidence. At the same time they have called for applicants who are resilient, adaptable, curious, trusting and creative but without saying why these particular traits are the most important, how they will be measured, or how the standards for selection will be set. Even Professor Raye Kass, who appears to be one of their few advisers on mental health issues, offers little more than anecdotes as evidence for the psychological feasibility of the programme.

Existing research suggests that the colonists will face at least four major psychological challenges. Individually, each of these is serious enough to raise a red flag. In combination, they are a disaster waiting to happen.

Social isolation

The Mars One colonists will be the most isolated humans to have ever lived. Because of their distance from Earth, real time interaction with people back home will be impossible - the shortest delay for sending transmissions will be about 10 minutes. For the rest of their lives they will be able to interact directly with only their fellow colonists, who will increase from three people in the first two years to 23 people after 10 years.

These circumstances will probably cause mental illness in at least some of the colonists. Decades of research shows that prolonged social isolation in astronauts can lead to depression, insomnia, anxiety, fatigue, boredom and emotional instability. Mars One believes that selecting applicants with the right attitude will help prevent such problems. As Kass puts it:

It all starts with attitude. Think of it. When a person finds herself, or himself, on Mars, with no way of being able to come home, and potentially questioning the decision that they have made, what is going to ground them in the choice they have made?

But we know that even the most highly trained astronauts suffer the side effects of isolation - and these are people who know they will be coming home, and who have years (sometimes decades) more experience than the Mars One crew will have. Professor Nick Kanas, a Nasa-funded expert in the psychological effects of space exploration, says that when Earth is out of view for an extended time, "crewmember psychology may result in increased feelings of isolation, homesickness, dysphoria, or even suicidal or psychotic thinking."

The notion that "attitude" will somehow inoculate the colonists against these conditions is at best naive, at worst irresponsible. How will the Mars One programme react when a colonist who was deemed psychologically fit suffers a major breakdown after years of isolation, with no way to get home? Who will be responsible then?

Confinement

A life on Mars will be a life indoors. The atmosphere is unbreathable and the global temperature averages -60C. From the moment they land, the colonists will spend at least 80% of their time within units that offer about 50 square metres per person - that's the size of two average-sized bedrooms. Consider a normal day in your own life and the variety of environments you find yourself moving between, as well as the different sensory experiences you take for granted. Compared with Earth, the colonists will live out their entire lives with a fraction of this exposure.

Not surprisingly, long-term confinement in a small space is associated with many of the same problems triggered by social isolation: depression, anxiety and cognitive impairment, among other symptoms. Animal studies show that captivity can stunt the normal development of young primates, leading to abnormally high fear and reduced exploration behaviours. What does this say about the side effects for children being born and raised in such an environment?

Loss of privacy

While the colonists go about their business, Earth will be watching them 24-7. We already know that surveillance can cause stress, fatigue, depression and anxiety, which will add even more weight to an already extreme mental health burden. The Mars One team has made no public comment on the effects of combining the risk factors of social isolation and confinement with surveillance, but we do know that the programme depends on the money raised by reality TV contracts. So presumably the show must go on.

What happens when the colonists get fed up with the interplanetary Truman Show and turn the cameras off? Will Mars One be forced to abandon them?

Lack of mental health services

Perhaps the most worrying concern is that the colonists won't have real-time access to mental health services such as counselling and psychotherapy. Recent studies have found that simulated psychotherapy via an automated computer programme called Deprexis can yield small-to-moderate benefits in depression, but this approach is only about 50% as effective as normal psychotherapy. And given that the colonists are likely to suffer from a wider range of psychological problems than depression, automated mental health interventions simply won't cut it.

Where does all this leave us? Mars One may be audacious and media-savvy but it is built on a psychological vacuum. In addition to the issues raised here, the planners have given no visible consideration to how they will address the lack of modern medicine, sexual relationships, pregnancy, raising children, ageing and death. And that's not even considering the public trauma on Earth that would follow a televised tragedy on Mars.

Mars One is either ignoring the psychological consequences of colonisation or failing to disclose them. Either way, if their plan goes ahead - and for the sake of the colonists we might hope that it doesn't - then Nasa's manned mission in the 2030s may well be dubbed Mars Rescue.

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Mars One: The psychology of isolation, confinement and 24-hour Big Brother | Chris Chambers

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Since April, thousands of people have applied to take a one-way trip to Mars. Following further stages of selection and training, the plan is for the first four astronauts to lift off in 2022. After a seven-month journey they will settle permanently on the red planet to conduct scientific experiments and do whatever it takes to survive.

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Dr. Platt

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national aeronautics and space administration

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Psychologists craft systems to lessen the mental strains astronauts might face 100 million miles away from earth.

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Dr. Platt

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Getting along with your fellow astronauts can be dangerous. Too much consensus - what some psychologists call "groupthink" - can keep crews from being creative in a crisis. But a new study found that six "cosmonauts" on a simulated Mars mission emerged from 105 days in a replica spacecraft with their quirks intact.

The study was the first to directly tackle the possible downside of harmony, rather than antagonism, in a space mission.

"Earlier, we had been focusing on how tension increases over time," said social psychologist Gro Sandal of the University of Bergen in Norway, lead author of a paper to be published in Acta Astronautica. "This paper has more or less the opposite focus: whether people start to think more and more similar while they are isolated."

Groupthink is still a controversial concept: Not all social psychologists think it exists. But those who believe in it think it tends to happen when people isolated in an extreme situation - a war zone, for instance, or a ship in the Arctic - start thinking in lockstep and avoiding outward disagreement. Groupthinkers also often feel like they're united against a common enemy - on a space mission, this could be Mission Control.

"The worst case scenario is ... there may be a microculture within the crew that evolves, and the crew starts having values that deviate to a large extent from values on Earth," Sandal said.

Sandal and colleagues monitored six pretend cosmonauts in a pilot study for the Mars500 project, an ongoing simulated space mission being held at the Institute of Biomedical Problems in Moscow. From March 31 to July 14, 2009, two Russian cosmonauts, a Russian medical doctor and sports physiologist, a mechanical engineer in the German army, and a French airline pilot lived and worked as if they were on a real space station.

The crew spent their days in a hamster-cage-like simulation chamber designed to reflect the dimensions and layout of the International Space Station. The chamber also mimicked the humidity, temperature, pressure and gas composition of the ISS, bringing the crew as close to space as they could get while still feeling Earth's gravity.

Each crew member had his own tiny sleeping quarters, plus a shared living room, kitchen and workplaces with medical equipment. The cosmonauts were kept to a strict schedule of eating, exercising and performing or participating in scientific experiments.

"We tried to keep the work procedures and the schedule of the days quite similar to the schedule and work accomplished during real flights," Sandal said.

To see how similar the cosmonauts' thought processes were, the researchers gave them a questionnaire before, after and at specific intervals during the 105 days of confinement. The questionnaire asked each cosmonaut to rank his personal values according to a scale developed by psychologist Shalom Schwartz in the 1990s.

"It's a good scale, and quite widely used," said psychologist Peter Suedfeld of the University of British Columbia, who is well known for studying the psychology of isolated groups, but was not involved in the new study. "We use it, too."

The scale splits human values up into 10 categories, including "hedonism" (people who value pleasure and enjoying themselves), "benevolence" (people who value preserving harmony in the in-group) and "tradition" (maintaining the status quo). Sandal and colleagues measured how similar the cosmonauts were to each other in each of these values, and how much that similarity changed over time.

>'We did not find any indications of groupthink. We saw that interpersonal differences became more salient.' One source of tension was the food.

They found that, rather than values converging and harmony reigning as the crew got used to each other, the cosmonauts grew more tense, especially in the last 35 days of the mission when they were allowed more autonomy.

"We did not find any indications of groupthink," Sandal said. "We saw that interpersonal differences within the crew became more salient as a source of tension."

One source of tension was the food. Two of the astronauts were unhappy with the meal choices and lost 20 pounds in the first 45 days of the mission. They thought the food included too many nutrition bars and cookies, Sandal said.

"I was hungry all the time. And angry," wrote one of these crew members. After Mission Control changed the meal plans for those two astronauts, "other crew members looked at us with hungry eyes."

Another point of contention was how closely to follow instructions from Earth.

"It was in some situations when Earth gave us some instructions, and Russians made their own way to how it was correct," one (presumably Russian) crew member wrote. "But Europeans followed the instructions of Earth like blind."

It's not clear what to conclude from this experiment, Sandal admits. Maybe if we choose groups of astronauts who begin with different values, we'll end up with tenser but safer crews.

Suedfeld notes that the paper only tracks how the group's average values changed as a whole, not how individual astronauts' values changed over time. He also pointed out that six astronauts isn't a sufficient sample for serious statistical analysis, and that it's hard to convince people they're actually in space when they know they're still on the ground.

"Whether a larger sample size or a longer duration together or being actually up in space - rather than an experiment on the ground - would come up with different results ... who knows?" he said. "I would consider it more a pilot study than one to draw strong conclusions from. But it can point the way for future studies."
Image: European Space Agency See Also:

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Groupthink Not a Problem in Simulated Mars Mission

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Getting along with your fellow astronauts can be dangerous. Too much consensus - what some psychologists call "groupthink" - can keep crews from being creative in a crisis. But a new study found that six "cosmonauts" on a simulated Mars mission emerged from 105 days in a replica spacecraft with their quirks intact.

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Dr. Platt

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It has been a year since Christiane Heinicke has had an egg. Or been in a car. Or gone outside without a spacesuit.

Since last August, the German physicist has been living with five other people in a 1,200-square-foot, solar-powered dome on the side of a Hawaiian volcano in an experiment in Mars-like living. The project, known as the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation, or HI-SEAS, ended Sunday.

Today, the crew is back in the town of Kailua-Kona to debrief and answer the big question: What advice would they give to future would-be inhabitants?

"Bring something to work on. Something meaningful to work on," Heinicke said in a video posted to Twitter on Sunday by the University of Hawaii, which is running the NASA-funded research project. "One of your biggest enemies is boredom. The other big enemies, of course, are the rest of the crew," she said, laughing.

The goal of HI-SEAS is to test what it would be like for people to live on Mars, and what the project designers call "team performance and cohesion" - or how a group of strangers might handle being stuck together for 12 months.

Asked what she learned about how to cope with living and working with the same five people all the time, Heinicke said emergencies play a surprising role in helping people get along.

At one point, for example, the system for gathering and treating water broke. To simulate life on Mars, the team received water and food only every two and four months, respectively. "Obviously, we need water, so we all needed to work on that as a group," Heinicke recalled.

"If you had some arguments within the group... it really helps to have an emergency to work on together, because everyone has new motivation," she said.

The study designers described the small dome where the crew lived as a "habitat," writing in a press release:

"It is an open concept design that includes common areas such as kitchen, dining, bathroom with shower, lab, exercise, and work spaces. A second floor loft spans an area of 424 square feet and includes six separate bedrooms and a half bath. In addition, a 160 square foot workshop converted from a 20 foot long steel shipping container is attached to the habitat."

Living in such close quarters is difficult. Asked whether the experience left her with any close friends, Heinicke was diplomatic. "Um, well, three of them I'm definitely going to stay in very close contact with," she said.

Hundreds of people apply from around the world to be part of HI-SEAS missions; this was the fourth one. Earlier missions have each lasted four or eight months. (Another simulation that ended in 2011 in Russia lasted 520 days.)

A committee of space experts chooses crew members they describe as "astronaut-like," and the candidate criteria include an undergraduate degree in science or engineering, at least three years of research experience or graduate study, and mental and physical strength. In addition to Heinicke, the crew for this mission included a NASA physician, a hydrologist from Montana, an MIT-trained engineer and pilot, a French astrobiologist and an architecture student from Tongji University in Shanghai.

The crew members did have access to the Internet and email, but there was a 20-minute delay to send or receive a message, to simulate the time it takes to transmit a message between Mars and Earth.

All six crew members kept blogs about the experience. In one post, the mission doctor, Sheyna Gifford, wrote about the experience of missing Earth without leaving the ground.

"For a few months after the mission first began I would have sort of waking dreams - bright moments where, for an instant, I would be standing somewhere on Earth. New Orleans. Boston Harbor. A street corner in New York City where I used to buy falafel and watch people walk their dogs.

...

"Then, I would blink and it would be gone. I called them 'Earthflashes'. They lasted for a few months before fading as mysteriously as they had started."

The researchers in charge of HI-SEAS are already planning the next Mars simulations. Potential crew members can apply now to spend eight months living on the Hawaiian version of Mars in 2017 and 2018.

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'Mars Mission' Crew Emerges From Yearlong Simulation In Hawaii

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It has been a year since Christiane Heinicke has had an egg. Or been in a car. Or gone outside without a spacesuit. Since last August, the German physicist has been living with five other people in a 1,200-square-foot, solar-powered dome on the side of a Hawaiian volcano in an experiment in Mars-like living.

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Dr. Platt

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On Tuesday, Elon Musk is expected to outline a plan to send human colonists to Mars.

Colonizing Mars certainly won't be easy, and if it ever happens, that probably won't be until the mid-2020s or 2030s. But if Musk has his way, he'll set up a permanent home for humanity on Mars, and that opens up some intriguing legal questions.

Mars belongs to everybody, according to the Outer Space Treaty, which the United States signed back in 1967. The treaty says nobody can own a celestial body. How might that affect Musk's plans?

Can You Do Whatever You Want In Space?

There's nothing in the space treaties that would stop Musk and his followers from going to Mars, says Frans von der Dunk, who studies space law at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Private companies are perfectly free to set out for Mars, build permanent habitats, and start a new society there--just as long as that society follows the rules of the Outer Space Treaty. For example, colonists can't deploy weapons of mass destruction (sorry, Elon), and they can't claim to own the land they're on.

"Their activities on Mars shouldn't interfere with activities of others in space," says von der Dunk.

Who's In Charge?

Although Musk's hypothetical colony wouldn't legally be an American colony, it would still be subject to American laws. That's because even if the Mars mission launches from Kazakhstan or French Guiana, SpaceX is an American company and the colonists would be traveling on an American ship.

Maritime laws provide a good example of the type of legal system we could expect on the red planet. Like international waters, nobody can own Mars, so instead each ship needs to follow the rules of the country whose flag it flies under. And, just like sailors, Mars explorers are still expected to abide by those rules even when they're off the ship.

Things get a little more complicated once you start adding other countries and companies into the Martian mix. On the International Space Station, for example, if an American astronaut were to hit a Russian astronaut over the head, first the U.S. would have the right to determine whether a criminal act was committed. If the U.S. doesn't take action, then he could be tried under Russian jurisdiction.

In addition, any sizeable, long-term colony on Mars is also going to need a local governing system. What form of government might or should take shape there? We'll leave that discussion up to the political scientists.

Does He Need Permission To Colonize Mars?

Currently, if you want to launch a rocket into space, you have to ask the government for permission. Then, depending on your activities in space, you have to apply for a second license to do specific things. For example, if you're launching a telecom satellite, you'll want to talk to the FCC.

However, as of yet "there is no license specifically for dealing with the legal implications of space colonization," says von der Dunk. In fact, it's not even clear which office would be in charge of giving out those licenses. NASA? The FAA? A whole new branch of the government?

As the number of companies wanting to carry tourists into space increases, the government is going to need to figure out a licensing procedure soon.

"There is no license specifically for dealing with the legal implications of space colonization."

Why Bother Enforcing Earth Laws On Another Planet?

We're supposed to avoid contaminating the celestial bodies that we explore, according to the Outer Space Treaty. Not only does that mean 'don't spread trash all over the solar system,' but it's generally interpreted to mean 'keep your microbes to yourself,' too.

If Earth microbes take root on Mars or Europa, we may never have the chance to find out if those worlds ever hosted alien life. So the major space agencies have a sort of "gentleman's agreement," says von der Dunk, to decontaminate their spacecraft as much as possible before sending them to other worlds. But human bodies are much harder to decontaminate, since our health depends on our microbes.

There a few sites on Mars that are considered deserving of heavier protection than others--areas where liquid water is thought to exist, for instance. Only the most thoroughly decontaminated vessels are supposed to enter those areas.

Will Elon Musk and his followers be expected to follow those same planetary protection "gentleman's agreements"? The licensing process, mentioned above, could determine whether potential colonizers will be legally bound to avoid spreading their germs all over Mars.

"The U.S. licensing process should make sure that the activities of Elon Musk and others do not violate key principles of planetary protection," says von der Dunk. "The U.S. has the power to make those binding of Elon Musk and whoever flies under his flag."

As companies prepare to mine asteroids and other bodies in the coming years, the government will need to set up a licensing procedure for that as well. It's unclear whether those companies would be held to strict planetary protection guidelines, but asteroid mining licensing could pave the way in making it easier (or harder) to include planetary protection in the guidelines for building settlements on other worlds.

"If the companies want to be seen as good citizens, and consider them fair requirements, it will be an easy thing," says von der Dunk. "But if they find planetary protection totally obstructive or heavy in cost and start protesting this, that will then have to be sorted out--or maybe fought out."

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On Tuesday, Elon Musk is expected to outline a plan to send human colonists to Mars. Colonizing Mars certainly won't be easy, and if it ever happens, that probably won't be until the mid-2020s or 2030s. But if Musk has his way, he'll set up a permanent home for humanity on Mars, and that opens up some intriguing legal questions.

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Dr. Platt

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With the recent discovery of flowing liquid water on Mars, talk has turned to what it would take to colonize Mars. But before you pack your bags, it's worth thinking about whether we should colonize Mars.

Here I am not arguing for a definitive answer to that question. Rather, I consider some of the ethical implications of a human outpost on the red planet, implications whose contemplation should be central to our space strategy rather than an afterthought.
Potential harm to Martian life forms.
Probably the strongest ethical argument against colonizing Mars would be if such colonization had the potential to harm any indigenous life forms that might be on Mars. Of course, we are not aware of any such life forms at the moment. The discovery of liquid water (and indications that the Martian surface may once have had much more of it) raises the possibility that there might have been life on Mars in the past. Life forms that once were, but are no longer, are probably immune to harmful impacts from Earthling settlement on Mars.

But what about indigenous life forms that haven't happened yet? What if there are processes happening right now through which life on Mars could emerge? If Earthling settlement would disrupt these processes, is that a harm we ought to avoid? More generally, do we have ethical obligations to potential life forms?

This question gets into ethical territory that is contentious among Earthlings, who don't always agree about our obligations to potential humans on a timescale of nine months or of several generations. I'm not sure the ethical disagreements get any clearer just because we have them on a different planet.

And even if moral intuitions were clear and uniform, here's another challenge: What is the moral status of life forms different enough from the ones we have on Earth that we might fail to recognize them as "life" in the first place? In the interests of extreme galactic biodiversity, would there be on obligation not to harm anything that might be alive (and to assume that our methods for assessing what's alive in our early encounters with Martian life are likely to give false negatives)? Does our sense of moral community only extend to life forms that sufficiently resemble Earth life forms? Would we recognize exotic Martian life forms as alive if they had the weaponry to make us?
Potential harmful impacts on Earth.
Even if Mars is a lifeless planet, whether it's ethical to colonize Mars may depend on what kinds of consequences the mission has here on Earth. The machinery of space travel uses natural resources. It generates waste products. It shifts funds away from other projects or purposes.

The ethical issue here is not just the magnitude of the costs of a colonization mission relative to the benefits of establishing a Mars colony. It's also a matter of how those costs and benefits are distributed - of whether the people who bear the costs will also enjoy the benefits.

Indeed, the social impacts of colonizing Mars may provide the most difficult ethical terrain. If a Mars colony holds the promise of a new start, an escape from messes we have created on our home planet, we need to consider the fairness of who gets to escape and who is left behind to deal with the mess. Even years prior to any realistic hope of a crewed mission to Mars, we might weigh the impacts of shifting scientific and engineering brainpower to this challenge - and away from addressing other human aspirations and needs, some of them quite pressing.

At the very least, we should think through the ethical implications of a project likely to benefit few people directly. Will it help Earthbound humans to address disease, climate change, war, social and economic inequality? Will it undercut efforts to address these issues?
Potential harmful impacts on the solar system.
Any mission of colonization from Earth to Mars takes for granted the larger environment of the solar system in which both planets maintain orbits. If the mission generates enough space junk to make future space travel hazardous, or involves engineering projects on Mars that end up disrupting the gravitational balance between heavenly bodies, that could be bad, both for the colonists and for folks back on Earth. It doesn't strike me as a likely consequence, but someone should surely do the calculations on this before any major Martian infrastructure projects commence.
Impacts on the pristine Martian environment.
Let's say even under our most expansive definition of "life" Mars turns out to be lifeless. Might we still have an obligation to preserve the pristine Martian environment?

Arguably, leaving the Martian environment in its current state might be of instrumental value (e.g., to scientists studying the natural geological history of the planet, or to sky-gazers). Surely, there would be something distasteful about marring the Martian landscape with a billboard visible from Earth. But is there more than instrumental value at stake here? If we have such an obligation, it strikes me as an extreme version of the position that we have ethical obligations to nature itself, regardless of its instrumental value to us. We usually think of nature as including various sorts of living things. Does a lifeless landscape have intrinsic value that places ethical obligations on us? Those who hold that it does should sharpen their argument while Mars is still pristine.
Should we assume that Mars is ours?
Even if we can work out the technical challenges around establishing a Mars colony, do we need it? What if some other inhabitants of the galaxy need Mars more (perhaps because their world has been destroyed) but we happened to get there first. Would we have an obligation to help them out by sharing Mars, or by ceding it to them and going back to Earth? Should we be thinking of Mars as a shared resource?

Who else do we imagine might need it, and for what? Maybe the real reason to protect the pristine Martian environment is in order to cultivate restraint in ourselves, rather than feeding our rapacious appetite for conquest.

Just because we have the technical capacity to do something doesn't mean that we should do it. Sending a crewed mission or human colonists to Mars is an expensive and risky undertaking if the goal just amounts to having Mars for our own.

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With the recent discovery of flowing liquid water on Mars, talk has turned to what it would take to colonize Mars. But before you pack your bags, it's worth thinking about whether we should colonize Mars. Here I am not arguing for a definitive answer to that question.

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Dr. Platt

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The only time that a formally designated NASA "life detection" mission was flown to another planet or moon was when the two Viking landers headed to Mars forty years ago.

The odds of finding some kind of Martian life seemed so promising at the time that there was little dispute about how much energy, money and care should be allocated to making sure the capsule would not be carrying any Earth life to the planet. And so after the two landers had been assembled, they were baked at more than 250 °F for three days to sterilize any parts that would come into contact with Mars.

Although the two landers successfully touched down on the Martian surface and did some impressive science, the life detection portion of the mission was something of a fiasco - with conflict, controversy and ultimately quite a bit of confusion.

Clearly, scientists did not yet know enough about how to search for life beyond Earth and the confounding results pretty much eliminated life-detection from NASA's missions for decades.

But scientific and technological advances of the last ten years have put life detection squarely back on the agenda - in terms of future searches for fossil biosignatures on Mars and for potential life surviving in the oceans of Europa and Enceladus. What's more, both NASA and private space companies talk seriously of sending humans to Mars in the not-too-distant future.

With so many missions being planned, developed and proposed for solar system planets and moons, the issue of planetary protection has also gained a higher profile. It seems to have become more contentious and to some seems far less straight-forward as it used to be.

A broad consensus appears to remain that bringing Earth life to another planet or moon, especially if it is potentially habitable, is a real possibility that is both scientifically and ethically fraught. But there are rumblings about just how much time, money and attention needs to be brought to satisfying the requirements of "planetary protection."

In fact, it has become a sufficiently significant question that the first plenary session of the recent Astrobiology Science Conference in Mesa, Arizona was dedicated to it. The issue, which was taken up in later technical sessions as well, was how to assess and weigh the risks of bringing Earth life to other bodies versus the benefits of potentially sending out more missions, more often and more cheaply.

It is not a simple problem, explained Andrew Maynard, director of the Risk Innovation Lab at Arizona State University. Indeed, he told the audience of scientists that it was a "wicked problem," a broadly used terms for issues that are especially complex and involve numerous issues and players.

As he later elaborated to me, other "wicked" risk-benefit problems include gene editing and autonomous driving - both filled with great potential and serious potential downsides. Like travel to other planets and moons.

"This is subjective," Maynard said, "but I'd put planetary protection on the more wicked end of the spectrum. It combines individual priorities and ethics - what people and groups deeply believe is right - with huge uncertainties. That makes it something never really experienced before and so escalates all factors of wickedness."

Those groups include scientists (who very much don't want Mars or another potentially habitable place to be contaminated with Earth life before they can get there), to advocates of greater space exploration (who worry that planetary protection will slow or eliminate some missions they very much want to proceed), to NASA mission managers (worried about delays and costs associated with planetary protections surprises.)

And then there's the general public which might (or might not) have entirely different ethical concerns about the potential for contaminating other planets and moons with Earth life.

No wonder the problem is deemed wicked.

We'll get into the pros and cons, but first some background:

I asked NASA's Planetary Protection officer, Catharine Conley, whether Earth life has been transported to its most likely solar system destination, Mars.

Her reply: "There are definitely Earth organisms that we've brought to Mars and are still alive on the spacecraft."

She said it is quite possible that some of those organisms were brushed off the vehicles or otherwise were shed and fell to the surface. Because of the strong ultraviolet radiation and the Earth life-destroying chemical makeup of the soil, however, it's unlikely the organisms could last for long, and equally unlikely that any would have made it below the surface. Nonetheless, it is sobering to hear that Earth life has already made it to Mars.

Related to this reality is the understanding that Earth life, in the form of bacteria, algae and fungi and their spores, can be extraordinarily resilient. Organisms have been discovered that can survive unimagined extremes of heat and cold, can withstand radiation that would kill us, and can survive as dormant spores for tens of thousands of years.

What's more, Mars scientists now know that the planet was once much warmer and wetter, and that ice underlies substantial portions of the planet. There are even signs today of seasonal runs of what some scientists argue is very briny surface water.

So the risk of Earth life surviving a ride to another planet or moon is probably greater than imagined earlier, and the possibility of that Earth life potentially surviving and spreading on a distant surface (think the oceans of Europa and Enceladus, or maybe a briny, moist hideaway on Mars) is arguably greater too. From a planetary protection perspective, all of this is worrisome.

The logic of planetary protection is, like almost everything involved with the subject, based on probabilities. Discussed as far back as the 1950s and formalized in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, the standard agreed on is to take steps that ensure there is less than a 1 in 10,000 chance of a spaceship or lander or instrument from Earth bringing life to another body.

This figure takes into account the number of microorganisms on the spacecraft, the probability of growth on the planet or moon where the mission is headed, and a series of potential sanitizing to sterilizing procedures that can be used. A formula for assessing the risk of a mission for planetary protection purposes was worked out in 1965 by Carl Sagan, along with Harvard theoretical physicist Sidney Coleman.

A lot has been learned since that time, and some in the field say it's time to re-address the basics of planetary protection. They argue, for instance, that since we now know that Earth life can (theoretically, at least) be carried inside a meteorite from our planet to Mars, then Earth life may have long been on Mars - if it is robust enough to survive when it lands.

In addition, a great deal more is known about how to sanitize a space vehicle without baking it entirely - a step that is both very costly and could prove deadly to the more sophisticated capsules and instruments. And more is known about the punishing environment on the surface of Mars and elsewhere.

People ranging from Mars Society founder Robert Zubrin to Cornell University Visiting Scientist Alberto G. Fairén in Nature Geoscience have argued - and sometimes railed - against planetary protection requirements. NASA mission managers have often voiced their concerns as well. The regulations, some say, slow the pace of exploration and science to avoid a vanishingly small risk.

Brent Sherwood, program manager for solar system mission formulation at JPL, spoke at AbSciCon about what he sees as the need for a review and possibly reassessment of the planetary protection rules and regulations. As someone who helps scientists put together proposals for NASA missions in the solar system, he has practical and long considered views about planetary protection.

He and his co-authors argue that the broad conversation that needs to take place should include scientists, ethicists, managers, and policy makers; and especially should include the generations that will actually implement and live with the consequences of these missions.

In the abstract for his talk, Sherwood wrote:

"The (1 chance in 10,000) requirement may not be as logically sound or deserving of perpetuation as generally assumed. What status should this requirement have within an ethical decision-making process? Do we need a meta-ethical discussion about absolute values, rather than an arbitrary number that purports to govern the absolute necessity of preserving scientific discovery or protecting alien life?"

As he later he told me: "I'm recommending that we be proactive and engage the broadest possible range of stakeholder communities.... With these big, hairy risk problems, everything is probabilistic and open to argument. People are bad at thinking of very small and very big numbers, and the same for risks. They tend to substitute opinion for fact."

Sherwood is no foe of planetary protection. But he said planetary protection is a "foundational" part of the space program, and he wants to make sure it is properly adapted for the new space era we are entering.

Planetary protection officer Conley contends that regular reviews are already built into the system. She told me that every mission gets a thorough planetary protection assessment early in the process, and that there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Rather, the risks and architecture of the missions are studied within the context of the prevailing rules.

In addition, she said, the group that oversees planetary protection internationally - the Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) - meets every two years and its Panel on Planetary Protection takes up general topics and welcomes input from whomever might want to raise issues large or small.

"You hear it said that there are protected areas on Mars or Europa where missions can't go, but that's not the case," she said. "These are sensitive areas where life just might be present now or was present in the past. If that's the case, then the capsule or lander or rover has to be sterilized to the level of the Viking missions."

She said that she understood that today's spacecraft are different from Viking, which was designed and built from scratch with planetary protection in mind. Today, JPL and other mission builders get some of their parts "off the shelf" in an effort to make space exploration less expensive.

"We do have to balance the goals of exploration and space science with making sure that Earth life does not take hold. We also have to be aware that taxpayer money is being spent. But if a mission sent out returns a signal of life, what have we achieved if it turns out to be life we brought there?

"I see planetary protection as a great success story. People identified a potential contamination problem back in the '50s, put regulations into place, and have succeeded in avoiding the problem. This kind of global cooperation that leads to the preventing of a potentially major problem just doesn't happen that often."

The global cooperation has been robust, Conley said, despite the fact that only NASA and the European Space Agency have a full-time planetary protection officer. She cited the planning for the joint Russian-Chinese mission to the Martian moon Phobos as an example of other nations agreeing to very high standards. She and her European Space Agency (ESA) counterpart traveled twice to Moscow to discuss planetary protection steps being taken.

So far, she said private space companies have been attentive to planetary protection as well. Some of the commercial space activity in the future involves efforts to mine on asteroids, and Conley said there is no planetary protection issues involved. The same with mining on our moon.

But should the day arrive that private companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin seriously propose a human mission to Mars - as they have said they plan to - Conley said they would have the same obligations as any NASA mission. The US has not yet determined how to ensure that compliance, she said, but companies already would need Federal Aviation Administration approval for a launch, and planetary protection is part of that.

Risk innovation expert Maynard, however, was not so sure about those protections. He said he could imagine a situation where Elon Musk of SpaceX or Jeff Bezos of Blue Origin or any other space entrepreneur around the world would decide to move their launch to a nation that would be willing to provide the service without intensive planetary protection oversight.

"The risk of this may be small, but this is all about the potentially outsize consequences of small risks," he said.

Maynard said that was hardly a likely scenario - and that commercial space pioneers so far have been supportive of planetary protection guidelines - but that he was well aware of the displeasure among some mission managers and participating scientists about planetary protection requirements.

Given all this, it's easy to see how and why planetary protection advocates might feel that the floodgates are being tested, and why space explorers looking forward to a time when Mars and other bodies might be visited by astronauts and later potentially colonized are concerned about potential obstacles to their visions.

This column has addressed the issue of "forward contamination" - how to prevent Earth life from being carried to another potentially habitable solar system body and surviving there. But there is another planetary protection worry and that involves "backward contamination" - how to handle the return of potentially living extraterrestrial organisms to Earth.

That will be the subject of a later column, but suffice it to say it is very much on the global space agenda, too.

The Apollo astronauts famously brought back pounds of moon rocks, and grains of asteroid and comet dust have also been retrieved and delivered. A sample return mission by the Russian and Chinese space agencies was designed to return rock or grain samples from the Martian moon Phobos earlier this decade, but the spacecraft did not make it beyond low Earth orbit.

However, the future will see many more sample return attempts. The Japanese space agency JAXA launched a mission to the asteroid 162173 Ryugu in 2014 (Hayabusa 2) and it will arrive there next year. The plan is to collect rock and dust samples and bring them back to Earth. NASA's OSIRIS-REx is also making its way to an asteroid, 101955 Bennu, with the goal of collecting a sample as well for return to Earth.

And in 2020 both NASA and ESA (with Russian collaboration) will launch spacecraft for Mars with the intention of preparing for future sample returns. Sample return is a very high priority in the Mars and space science communities, and many consider it essential for determining whether there has ever been life on Mars.

So the "wicked" challenges of planetary protection are only going to mount in the years ahead.

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Planetary Protection is a "Wicked" Problem

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The only time that a formally designated NASA "life detection" mission was flown to another planet or moon was when the two Viking landers headed to Mars forty years ago.

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Dr. Platt

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Our cautiousness is stifling space exploration.

airspacemag.com

We're being overprotective of Mars.

That's the main point Alberto Fairén of Cornell University and co-authors (including me) make in a new article published in the journal Astrobiology. This new paper extends the arguments made by Fairén and myself in a commentary published in Nature Geoscience in 2013, in which we contended that (1) Mars is likely already contaminated by unsterilized or poorly sterilized spacecraft sent from Earth in the past, or by frequent asteroid exchange, (2) sterilization methods kill only those microorganisms with no chance of surviving on Mars anyway, as they rely on the same stresses such as radiation, and (3) any indigenous life on Mars should be much more adapted to Martian stresses than Earth life is, and would outcompete possible competition.

The new paper is very timely, as there is currently a raging discussion about whether the Curiosity rover should be allowed to explore and sample recurring slope lineae seen on Mars, which many planetary scientists believe to be water at or near the surface, and which may be reachable from the rover's current location. These features may contain salty water, which could in turn be a habitat for microbes.

In the past, it's been assumed that strict planetary protection measures would be required before sampling these regions. Otherwise, it might be difficult to distinguish between any indigenous Martian life forms and life that arrived as contamination from Earth. However, Fairén and co-authors argue that technology has advanced enough that this is no longer a problem. If Martian life is biochemically different from Earth life, we would be able to detect that based on its building blocks. And if not, we could add Martian life to the tree of DNA-based life that we already know, probably somewhere on its lower branches.

Furthermore, given NASA's hope to launch human missions to Mars in the 2030s, current planetary protection guidelines are impractical, as humans would inevitably bring microbial hitchhikers with them. Shouldn't we find out prior to human landings whether there is indigenous life on Mars-if only for the safety of the astronauts?

It should be pointed out, though, that our suggested relaxation of planetary protection rules only applies to "forward contamination"-the possible spreading of Earth life to other planets and moons. There is general agreement that the rules for backward contamination-the possibility that robotic probes or humans could bring extraterrestrial microbes back to Earth-should remain in place. After all, there is a (slight) chance that returning samples could endanger humanity. If anything, I think the backward contamination rules could be made stricter, and relaxing the forward contamination rules would actually assist in this, as we will have a better idea what future astronauts might bring back to Earth. Nothing is more dangerous than a lack of knowledge!

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About Dirk Schulze-Makuch

Dirk Schulze-Makuch is a Professor at the Technical University Berlin, Germany, and an Adjunct Professor at Arizona State University and Washington State University. He has published seven books and nearly 200 scientific papers related to astrobiology and planetary habitability.

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It's Time to Loosen Planetary Protection Rules for Mars

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airspacemag.com We're being overprotective of Mars. That's the main point Alberto Fairén of Cornell University and co-authors (including me) make in a new article published in the journal Astrobiology .

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Dr. Platt

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Andrew Rich/Vetta/Getty

The world sucks right now. Terrorism. Climate change. Political acrimony. Nonstop Justin Bieber songs.

It's nice to know Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have a plan. They will help the richest people in the world go to Mars and start over, leaving the other 99 percent to suffer on a dying, warring planet. The only solace for those of us left here will be that the Biebs should be prosperous enough to go with them.

This is the unspoken flip side of Musk's SpaceX and Bezos's Blue Origin. The space travel companies say they are creating a way for the human species to endure by populating other planets. But the bottom line is that only the wealthy will have the means to move to Mars. Musk's target ticket price is $500,000 a person in 2015 dollars, and that's just to get there. Imagine the new outfits you'll have to buy to go with that space helmet.

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So you can picture a scenario that's something like the 1970s white flight from inner cities, when the wealthier classes moved to freshly built suburbs, leaving the declining neighborhoods to the lower classes. In fact, the fleeing upper classes sped up the decrepitude of that era's older cities by relocating their money and clout with them. Today, we're seeing a similar situation in Syria, as the wealthiest and most educated people escape to the West, which will make the country even harder to stabilize and rebuild.
Related: An Entertaining Theory: NASA Finds Buddha Statue on Mars
Such a dynamic could apply to the whole world in about 40 years. Maybe historians and scientists, charting Earth's degeneration will trace a direct link back to this month's climate talks in Paris. Couldn't make a deal stick, they'll say. Environment spun out of control. Drought. Upheaval. Anarchy. And then Wall Street bankers, tech titans, CEOs and Jay Z's entourage decided to get the hell out and build McMansions in Martian space bubbles.

All this might sound crazy-except it's not. Last month, Blue Origin advanced the technology of space flight by another important notch. The secretive company launched a rocket 62 miles into space and then landed it upright, like you might see in a sci-fi movie, just a few feet from the rocket's launchpad. It's a step toward making reusable rockets, and reusable rockets are absolutely essential to getting the cost of a Mars flight low enough to expand the target market beyond the Forbes 400.

For comparison's sake, NASA space shuttle missions cost about $200 million per astronaut, and those flights went only into orbit. Compared with going to Mars, orbit is like putting a toe in the Atlantic versus sailing from Europe to the New World. And the shuttle, by the way, was not a reusable rocket-it was a reusable passenger compartment. No one had previously made a reusable rocket, which is a big reason space cost so much. The economics were as bad as if you had to buy a new engine for every car trip.

Blue Origin is now ginning up a real space race with SpaceX, which will help drive innovation and lower costs. Musk got a head start and has guided SpaceX into the business of launching satellites as a way to practice for human space travel. Bezos opened Blue Origin-a little side project when he's not running Amazon.com-specifically to carry people to other planets, and it got its first rocket off the ground in April.

Also in the mix are Richard Branson with his Virgin Galactic and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who funded the nerdily named Stratolaunch Systems. Space is turning into a billionaire-athon. If Donald Trump doesn't become president, you just know there has to be a Trump Spaceship in his future.

Of course, launching a few rockets and saying you're going to Mars is like writing a haiku and saying you're going to become the next John Updike. But these guys are serious. "Our ultimate vision is millions of people living and working in space," Bezos told reporters after the Blue Origin landing. Musk makes even grander statements. "We need to be laser-focused on becoming a multi-planet civilization," he's said. "That's the next step."

At least in some circles, building colonies on Mars has entered the realm of the possible. Some writers and scientists think the first brave souls will make the six-month journey to Mars within 10 years, and that's Musk's prediction. Not long after the technology is proven, regular flights of supplies and people will begin. The pioneers will have to build habitable indoor spaces and, later, domed communities. As this year's hit movie The Martian showed us, once on Mars it's possible to grow food, make breathable air and harvest energy from solar panels. Musk calls Mars "a fixer-upper of a planet," but by 2040, he says, there should be a thriving colonial Martiantown.

That time frame is sobering-just 25 years from now. Think how fast 25 years can whip by. If you go back to 1990, Bill Clinton was eyeing his first run for the presidency, and Tim Berners-Lee was proposing the World Wide Web.

The real migration will start post-2040. Volume will drive down flight prices from tens of millions of dollars a person to $500,000. People will start companies on Mars. They'll take their families. "It's not going to be a vacation jaunt," Musk said in interviews. "It's going to be saving up all your money and selling all your stuff, like when people moved to the early American colonies." His goal, which he believes is achievable, is to get Mars up to a population of 1 million, which Musk says "is the critical threshold for us as a civilization to not join the potentially large number of one-planet dead civilizations out there."

And that comment gets to the point about who goes and why. Some will go to seek opportunity, but the quiet assumption is that many will go out of self-preservation. The sad calculus is that the Mars business looks better the worse things get on Earth. And if that's the case, it's actually not like moving from Europe to the American colonies in 1700, when things were OK in Europe. It sounds more like escaping a ravaged land to go somewhere safe and start over.
Related: Jeff Bezos's Company Blue Origin Launches and Lands a Rocket
Who will do that? The cost of the flight and setting up on another planet will hover well past the means of almost anyone but the superrich. Where will these wealthy people come from? Most of the space travel companies so far are American. What if those companies take mostly Americans? Will we start a human colony on Mars or an American colony?

Maybe later Mars will rebel and sign its Declaration of Independence from Earth. Maybe it will shut its borders and refuse any more refugees from that hot, horrible, hungry origin planet. We're the exceptional people, the Martians might say, and all of you Earthlings just keep screwing up your home, so we don't want you.

They might even send Bieber back. Wouldn't that teach us a lesson?

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Andrew Rich/Vetta/Getty The world sucks right now. Terrorism. Climate change. Political acrimony. Nonstop Justin Bieber songs. It's nice to know Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have a plan. They will help the richest people in the world go to Mars and start over, leaving the other 99 percent to suffer on a dying, warring planet.

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Dr. Platt

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Biologist Dr D. N. Lee has been doing an amazing job educating on how enthusiastic narratives of "colonising" Mars are problematic. On her Twitter, Lee notes that the dominant ways of talking about colonisation add to the marginalisation of under-represented minorities in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). If we want to make science more inclusive, we need to better understand how the stories we tell about STEM may exclude and damage under-represented groups we are trying to support.

Lee notes that talking about Mars in terms of colonisation is not simply an issue of semantics - for example using "settlement" instead of colonising. Rather, media narratives unquestioningly champion rich White men's ideas about what Mars travel should mean: "we don't have to be stuck on Earth!" The narrative is being framed around "saving" humanity. (See a Storify of Lee's discussion for further context.)

Lee asks: saving from what, whom, and why? And in this re-imagining of humanity's salvation, who is left behind? Who does the dangerous, under-paid work of building new colonised spaces? In short, what have we learned from history about colonisation? It is rooted in exploitation and inequality. On Twitter, Lee writes:

"When I hear scientists discuss "for the good of humanity" I check who is talking and if they listen to "others." History AND Contemporary events have demonstrated how often people will exploit and harm 'others' when diverse ppl cant inform policy... If Mars will be better place (where the wealthy are clamoring to) & earth is the place to be "stuck", then WHO is stuck & w/ what resources... In human history there's a profound diff in exploration, recon, even trading with other peoples vs Imperialism, conquering & colonization...Thing is, when Some of us hear Colonization, Enterprise Expansion, New wealth acquisition, we have a VERY different Movie trailer playing"

Lee is clear that space exploration is not the problem; she is questioning the context of talking about Mars as a place to colonise, as a way to escape problems on Earth, which have arisen as a result of colonial practices in the first place.

Lee demonstrates that White male entrepreneurs encourage the public to give up on our responsibilities on Earth, both environmentally and socially. They do so in ways that mirror the colonisation of Indigenous cultures.

Lee shows that this Mars narrative is exclusionary. The reaction to her discussion amplifies this exclusion.

White male space enthusiasts have been arguing back at Lee on Twitter, saying that Mars represents an opportunity to start over; to get social justice right. They tell her that if she continues to be "negative," she will miss out on the opportunity to engage with the future of space science, because the public will turn off her. One White man even said to Lee the equivalent of: We need women like you on Mars to procreate! (As if women's special place in this brave new world is solely to reproduce, rather than her scientific practice and the leadership she is demonstrating.)

Former NASA engineer Homer Hickam was one of the men who dismissed Lee's conversation as "silly." Hickam is someone Lee says she looked up to (Hickam's life story inspired the movie October Sky starring Jake Gyllenhaal). She tried to engage him in a discussion about why the points of view of people of colour (POC) matter. She discussed colonialism and White male privilege. For example, his views as a White man dominate STEM, but her views as woman of colour are dismissed.

Hickam responded that he is proud that his ancestors had social privilege because that means they were successful and earned their place in colonised spaces. He applauds manifest destiny more than once. He evoked a Native American ancestor to justify his racist comments (whilst celebrating the tenacity of his White ancestors to colonise). Hickam derided Lee's concerns as a fellow scientist because she is a woman of colour. He then blocked her, effectively shutting down the conversation about inclusion. As a senior figure in STEM with greater social power, Hickam proves Lee's argument, that only White men's views are allowed respect in STEM.

Lee notes that if we can't get the conversation about diversity and inclusion right, here and now - then how can we ever hope to restart afresh elsewhere?

Exploration can happen in many ways, and these do not necessarily have to involve exploitation, enslavement, dispossession, rape, genocide, removal of children from their communities, being forced into missionary settlements, forced to convert religion and violently made to assimilate. Colonialism only happens through violence - including all the methods mentioned, which have happened to Indigenous groups around the world. This colonial violence continues in the present day.

Indigenous Australians were the first to migrate out of Africa 75,000 years ago. Their population was decimated when Europeans arrived in Australia in 1788. The colonisers declared Australia "terra nullius" (uninhabited land). Indigenous Australians, like all other Indigenous groups, have suffered violence and inequalities ever since. In fact, right now, the Australian Government is forcing 150 Indigenous communities off their ancestral lands in Western Australia. This will make 12,000 Aboriginal people refugees in their own country.

Why is this happening? Because the Government says living in these lands is not economically viable and wanting to live there is a "lifestyle choice" the Government does not support. More to the point, these communities are set up on land that is rich in natural resources. Other parts of Western Australia are just as remote, yet business and Government made them viable so mining towns could be set up.

So the point Lee makes about colonial narratives is valid and pressing: rich White men make decisions that adversely affect minorities. They talk about these decisions in ways that replicate historical violence, and in so doing, they compound inequalities happening on Earth. Lee is saying: why would Mars be any different if Indigenous and POC perspectives are being forced out of discussions and policy making?

Imagine you are a young Indigenous child intrigued about space. Indigenous groups, including in Australia, already have many sacred stories about the stars that have influenced science. Indigenous Australians may be " the world's oldest astronomers." What a great way to connect Indigenous youth with STEM careers! But now imagine they see these media stories, where White men conceive of space travel in colonial terms, while at the same time they are living through their communities being pushed off their lands. They also see only a few brave people of colour, like Lee, standing up to big-name White men in STEM, while these leaders and other so-called "allies" are calling this Black scientist "silly."

We have so few Indigenous groups in STEM as it is; the numbers in astronomy can be counted in one hand when we look at gender breakdowns in different locations.* So why would these minorities want to join a STEM profession if White scientists want to assert their right to ignore historical violence? STEM pushes out minorities in many ways; this is just one example.

Language is not benign. Language matters for diversity and inclusion, as do the ideas informing our choice of words, and the stories we choose to weave, and those we ignore.

Lee's Storify only covers the first day of comments; Lee fended off racist push-back for a couple of days. I encourage you to go to Lee's Twitter feed to read how she further connects her argument to discussions about diversity in STEM.

Lee's key point is on the importance of framing STEM stories in a more inclusive manner. It's not just words; it's the thinking behind these words that also influences how we teach and learn science; it's how existing policies are maintained; it's how some voices continue to shout down Others.

For a complementary perspective, see science artist Glendon Mellow's tweets, where he uses an art metaphor. The culture, training and perspective of the first artists and architects sent to Mars will shape how the new world is designed. If that view is White, male and framed around colonialism, that will be reflected in the infrastructure.

The conversation we need to have: how can we learn from Lee's arguments to make science more inclusive? How might we use this perspective in our teaching and advocacy? How can we use post-colonial theory (study of how history of colonial oppression shapes modern-day inequalities) to support diversity and inclusion?

On inclusion of Indigenous groups in STEM:

Read my other posts on Indigenous Australians:

About the ongoing impact of colonialism in Australia:

In 2013, Michael Mansell, lawyer and activist from the Palawa, Trawlwoolway and Pinterrairer people, noted that "Australia is the only country that relies on the arrival of Europeans on its shores as being so significant it should herald the official national day." Earlier this week, Former Australian of the year Dr Tom Calma, Aboriginal elder of the Kungarakan tribal group and a member of the Iwaidja tribal group, argued that Australia Day/Survival Day is an opportunity to learn about Indigenous history, something that is not formally acknowledged as part of our national celebrations. Pictured here is raper PHILLY, WembaWemba man based in Melbourne, and winner of last year's Unearthed, who was amazing onstage at the Share the Spirit festival. He had many skilled MCs join him as guests. Hosted by @songlines_music #survivalday #australiaday #IndigenousAustralians #Indigenous #Melbourne #victoria #Australia #history #sociology #visualsociology #socialscience #sociologyofmelbourne #music #philly #igersmelbourne #WembaWemba #philly #michaelmansell #tomcalma #Palawa# Trawlwoolway #Pinterrairer #Kungarakan #Iwaidja #rap #hiphop #sharethespirit #songlines

A post shared by Dr Zuleyka Zevallos (@othersociology) on

Top image: Original by NASA, via Wikimedia. Adapted by Zuleyka Zevallos.

Centre image: [White woman showing a story that reads "Mission to Mars." She says: "Yay! Mars. Let's go!" Group gathered around her frowns. Man of colour thinks "This is some bull." Another woman of colour thinks "I don't see it. Do you see it? You got to be rich to see it."] Source: via Lee.

Follow me @OtherSociology or click below!

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Rethinking the Narrative of Mars Colonisation

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Biologist Dr D. N. Lee has been doing an amazing job educating on how enthusiastic narratives of "colonising" Mars are problematic. On her Twitter, Lee notes that the dominant ways of talking about colonisation add to the marginalisation of under-represented minorities in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM).

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Overview of Moon to Mars: NASA's plans to enable human exploration of the Moon as preparation for human missions to Mars and deeper into the solar system.

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The thought of terraforming Mars is one of those ideas so outrageous that it just might work! Learn how it will work!

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https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/jpl/pia21934/opposing-dunes-opposing-winds

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In Brief

The goal of the Mars One mission is to send a manned mission to the red planet and establish a permanent human colony. Those who volunteer will not return to Earth.

Mars One is an ambitious project, to say the least. The company behind the project aims to establish a permanent human settlement on Mars. Crews of four will depart every two years, if everything going according to plan. People should start on their journey sometime in 2024. However, the first unmanned mission will be launched in 2018 (again, if everything goes according to plan).

The young men and women who volunteered to make the trip to the Red Planet will be setting up permanent residence there, and we do mean permanent. No return trip for this flight will (or can) occur. The colonists who make the voyage will ultimately have to adapt to the environment of the planet, which is cold, dry, and kind of rusty (Literally - Mars has lots of iron oxide, hence the red landscape). If there is a major catastrophe, there will be no help - no one coming to answer an SOS. Yet, these people are still willing to venture into the unknown. Why would they do such a thing?

The list of potential Mars explorers was made even smaller on February 16th, 2015. Meet those competing to be the first humans to land on the Red Planet, and get to know their story, in the below video:

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Meet the People Who Volunteered to Live (and Die) on Mars

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In Brief The goal of the Mars One mission is to send a manned mission to the red planet and establish a permanent human colony. Those who volunteer will not return to Earth. Mars One is an ambitious project, to say the least. The company behind the project aims to establish a permanent human settlement on Mars.

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When are we going to Mars? The aerospace giant Lockheed Martin's answer is 2028 - but that date comes with an asterisk.

The company last week unveiled its vision of a "Mars Base Camp." This is a 256-foot segmented spacecraft that would carry astronauts to Mars just 12 years from now, under the Lockheed timeline. The asterisk is that the astronauts wouldn't land, but would stay in orbit around the Red Planet, and eventually rocket back to Earth.

Lockheed's vision of an orbital mission is somewhat pragmatic as humans-to-Mars concepts go. A Mars landing is exceedingly difficult, because the atmosphere is too thin to be of much help with aerobraking or parachutes, but it is thick enough to cause turbulence or burn up your spacecraft if you're not careful. The aerospace wizards have managed to land something as massive as a small car on Mars (the Curiosity rover), but to put humans on the surface they'd need to land something the size of a two-story house. So Lockheed's vision starts with an orbital mission, with a landing sometime down the road - maybe 2033, Lockheed's chief technologist for exploration systems Tony Antonelli told The Post.

"Twenty thirty-three is definitely plausible," Antonelli said. "The first thing is to get folks excited about going. It's got to be tangible. We think the technology exists today to pull off the orbital mission."

He said his company is working actively on what it would take to land humans on the surface of Mars.

"We're working on that today. The technologies exist, and that's why we want to push for this capability for an orbiting Mars laboratory with scientists in Mars orbit."

A couple of things jump out from this proposal. The first is the date. It outpaces, to a modest degree, what NASA has been saying. The year 2028 sounds a little ambitious given the number of elements that have to be pre-staged (including the rovers on the surface of Mars that the orbiting astronauts would manipulate remotely), and the hardware that still needs to be built. To send humans to Mars you need a habitation module, something much bigger than a capsule, because it's a trip that would take anywhere from 6 to 11 months one-way, depending on the year and the ratio of propellant to payload (go slower and you can send a bigger crew and more material, including spare parts for when things break). NASA has yet to issue any contracts for the construction of a habitation module. Keep in mind that Lockheed got the contract to build the Orion spacecraft in 2006 - and the capsule still isn't finished.

Perhaps Lockheed took note of the big headlines SpaceX received when it announced last month that it would send an uncrewed capsule to the surface of Mars as soon as 2018.

[SpaceX says it will fly a spacecraft to Mars as soon as 2018]

People like dates. A date like 2018 or 2028 takes a notional idea - a concept that's not much more than a PowerPoint slide at this point - and makes it more arresting. But Lockheed says this would be a NASA-run operation, likely with international partners. Lockheed doesn't make the call on the date. The company is not going to go unilaterally. NASA and its partners would decide. And NASA has other plans for the 2020s.

NASA has said that's the decade in which it will send humans to the "proving ground." This is a fairly new way to brand "cislunar space." The exact parameters of the Proving Ground aren't entirely clear, but would include missions in orbit around the Earth's moon. NASA and its partners might also send a crew a million miles from Earth (roughly four times farther than the moon) in a "shakedown cruise" to test long-duration spaceflight hardware and the physical effects of venturing beyond the planet's protective magnetic field (which blocks much of the harmful radiation that saturates deep space).

So why did Lockheed say 2028? Antonelli said the company believes that existing technology puts the United States on pace for a mission about that time, with the "shakedown cruise" happening as soon as 2026. And the 2028 date leaves room to follow up the orbital Mars mission with a more ambitious effort to land humans on the surface in 2033 - the favored date of many people in the space policy world, including the powerful chairman of the Science, Space and Technology Committee, Rep. Lamar Smith (R.-Tex.). Thus Lockheed's date slots nicely amid some favored bureaucratic and political timelines.

Another interesting detail: The Lockheed plan uses two Orion capsules. The company has the contract for these spacecraft, which have been 10 years in the making. Skeptics have noted that it's not entirely clear where Orion is supposed to go. The capsules were originally designed for lunar missions (a separate lunar lander would have taken astronauts to the surface). President Obama canceled George W. Bush's Constellation program, which included moon landings. Congress stepped in and saved elements of Constellation, including Orion and the big rocket now known as the Space Launch System. Ask someone at NASA or Lockheed what all this hardware is for, and you'll hear that it's part of the "Journey to Mars." So now we have the Mars Base Camp - launched with SLS rockets and using a pair of Orions. Message: These aren't Rockets and Capsules To Nowhere after all!

[NASA has a new spaceship, but where will it go?]

NASA has not yet decided how and when it will go to Mars and is keeping its options open. That can drive a lot of people crazy, because it can seem halting and indecisive, but it's politically savvy and makes some technological sense. On the politics side, you don't want to craft a mission that's too closely branded as a presidential directive. Because then the people in power who don't like that president will try to shoot it down. And technology evolves. NASA doesn't want to get locked into an architecture in 2016 if the mission to Mars is going to be in the 2030s. It can't put off these decisions forever - at some point you have to call your shot - but the agency probably has a few years to play with.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk and his SpaceX folks have consistently said they can send astronauts to the surface of Mars in the 2020s - but that's a whole 'nother story.
Further reading: Andy Weir, author of 'The Martian,' aims his pen at the moon Meet Lockheed's Outpost, a habitat for the 'proving ground' of space NASA's Mission Improbable Which way to space? Cool graphic: Deconstructing the International Space Station

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Could this 'Mars Base Camp' really send astronauts to the Red Planet in 2028?

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When are we going to Mars? The aerospace giant Lockheed Martin's answer is 2028 - but that date comes with an asterisk. The company last week unveiled its vision of a "Mars Base Camp." This is a 256-foot segmented spacecraft that would carry astronauts to Mars just 12 years from now, under the Lockheed timeline.

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On Thursday, September 7 at 10:00 am EDT, SpaceX successfully launched the Orbital Test Vehicle 5 (OTV-5) payload from Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A) at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

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CLOSE

Space fans around the globe this week will again be hanging on Elon Musk's every word as he updates his vision for establishing a city on Mars.

"This should be worth seeing," Musk said in a tweet teasing his Friday presentation to the International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide, Australia. "Design feels right."

Musk promised to detail "major improvements & some unexpected applications" for SpaceX's proposed Interplanetary Transport System, the giant rocket and spaceship he unveiled a year ago at the same conference in Mexico.

The speculation is that the SpaceX and Tesla CEO will present a scaled-down version of the system he initially said would carry 100 people to the Red Planet on each flight blasting off from Kennedy Space Center, atop a 400-foot rocket firing 42 engines.

Musk projected those flights could lead to a self-sustaining, million-person Martian civilization within 40 to 100 years.

Artist concept of SpaceX's Interplanetary Transport System preparing to blast off on a Mars mission from Kennedy Space Center. (Photo: SpaceX)

After further review, SpaceX may have concluded that concept was too big and costly as a starting point.

"It is like designing a 400-passenger aircraft in the 1920s," said aerospace consultant Charles Miller, president of NexGen Space. "The market is not there yet. Someday it will be, but not now."

CLOSE

Miller predicts Musk will introduce a smaller, fully reusable rocket with a new upper stage that would not travel to Mars, as in the first design. That would make it available for a greater variety of deep space missions including moon shots.

Musk himself hinted at the need for a more affordable architecture.

In Mexico a year ago, he jokingly listed a Kickstarter campaign and "stealing underpants" - a reference to an episode of the animated series "South Park" - among potential funding sources for the estimated $10 billion project

This week, Musk deadpanned on Twitter that those sources have "turned out to be um... less lucrative than expected."

CLOSE

Privately held SpaceX for now can commit to Mars vehicles only a fraction of the money it earns from launching satellites or ferrying cargo and - perhaps starting next year - astronauts to the International Space Station for NASA.

The company also has plans to deploy thousands of small satellites to provide global Internet service.

By last year, its investments had produced test versions of a giant composite fuel tank and a Raptor rocket engine for the Mars rocket.

Since then, the company has achieved Musk's once-mocked goal of making Falcon rockets reusable, a technology he believes can be scaled up to bigger rockets and is essential to dropping the cost of a Mars ticket below $200,000.

Artist concept of SpaceX's proposed Interplanetary Transport System carrying 100 Mars settlers to the Red Planet. (Photo: SpaceX)

But how to pay for it all, without the resources of a national space agency?

"I think you'll see some ideas and approaches for funding, which is the big question on everyone's mind," said Phil Larson, a former SpaceX official who is now assistant dean and chief of staff at the University of Colorado's College of Engineering and Applied Science.

Larson expects Musk will unveil a scaled-down but still large, exploration-class rocket suitable for missions everywhere from low Earth orbit to Mars. The design would lower development costs and open up more potential customers.

"How do you engineer a solution that can drive both the exploration and the economies of scale needed to help make this happen in an expedited way?" he said. "What that looks like, I think you'll see this week."

Musk's speech is expected to be viewable by webcast at 12:30 a.m. EDT Friday, more than 13 hours behind the local time in Adelaide.

"There's a good amount of mystery around it, which is kind of Elon's style," said Josh Guild, interim executive director of the nonprofit Space Frontier Foundation, an advocate for space settlement. "Elon is just one of those masters of showmanship."

Musk has backed up his showmanship with results. Within 15 years of its founding, SpaceX has succeeded in landing and reusing large, orbital rockets, something many in the industry dismissed as impossible or impractical. (The company has also suffered two rocket failures.)

"Now that we've seen some real, incredible progress coming from the private sector, it's very inspiring to see what will come next," said Guild. "We're all very hopeful that it will succeed, and we'll get to see other human beings living on another planet in the next decade."
Contact Dean at 321-242-3668 or jdean@floridatoday.com. And follow on Twitter at @flatoday_jdean and on Facebook at facebook.com/jamesdeanspace.
Read or Share this story: http://on.flatoday.com/2k3mLGB

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SpaceX's Elon Musk to unveil updated vision for Mars settlement

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CLOSE Space fans around the globe this week will again be hanging on Elon Musk's every word as he updates his vision for establishing a city on Mars. "This should be worth seeing," Musk said in a tweet teasing his Friday presentation to the International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide, Australia.

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NASA's Curiosity Mars Rover Climbing Toward Ridge Top

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NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has begun the steep ascent of an iron-oxide-bearing ridge that's grabbed scientists' attention since before the car-sized rover's 2012 landing.

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Do you remember reading or hearing about that company that wanted to turn a mission to Mars into a reality show? They promised you, the viewer, a behind-the-scenes look as they selected, trained, and sent people to the red planet.

It was a popular concept, considering 200,000 people applied. Granted, though, only 4,227 people paid the application fee .

But it also had some . Some people weren't sure if the world was ready to see the likely possibility of astronauts dying in space, going crazy, or otherwise failing to reach their destination.

Travel to Mars remains one of the most heated space debates this side of whether Pluto is a planet (hint: you can't have nine pizzas without Pluto). Even President Trump has committed to focusing on the moon instead.

But some private companies continue to march towards that rusty dream. Mars One, the company behind the still coming soon reality show, is one of those companies.

The Mars One Dream

The company's dream is the same one that spurred early American settlers passed the Appalachian mountains: the promise of a new home on a new frontier. The hope for gold, or in the case of Mars, underground water, didn't hurt either.

Mars One wants to create a permanent, human settlement on Mars. Permanent as in, "one way." To keep the costs of a return trip down to zero, they plan to only bring people who are looking for a new life on a new planet.

How will they pay for this all? That's where the above mentioned reality show comes in. All the ad revenue of this no-way-going-to-show-humans-freezing-to-death-in-space tv show will go towards funding the mission.

Individual donations don't hurt either.

The Mars One dream has seen its share of controversy, with many labeling it a dangerous pipe dream, but what revolutionary idea isn't controversial? You can't achieve big unless you dream big.

So whatever happened to them? Oh, they're still around and dreaming even bigger.

Unfortunately, dreaming is pretty much all they are doing.

The Mars One Reality Today

Here is what they have actually accomplished today: very little.

Let's start with the good stuff. Out of the thousands of applications they received, they managed to find 100 potential candidates who are ready for the one way trip. This hardy group includes people looking for a new scientific adventure , wanting to make their mark on history, or who are just so ready to leave Earth - the movie, The Martian , looked like a Travelocity commercial for Mars.

This is a step in the right direction, but a few more steps are required. Actually, if Mars One was working on their daily 10,000 steps, they'd have to consider walking the long way to work in the morning.

They're still missing a few minor details like how to get the astronauts to Mars and how to settle them on the planet. While other companies have been designing a prototyping new rockets or running long-term human settlement experiments, Mars One hasn't even really updated their webpage.

In fact, they have continued to push back there target mission date over the past couple years. Several delays such as finding non-reality TV show-related money have pushed the final date from 2024, 2026, and again, to . The company does hope to launch support equipment like a communications satellite before then.

2017 is supposed to be the year they start training there astronauts. While no official announcements have been made, many experts agree that it is highly unlikely they will reach this mark. In fact, some experts think Mars One doesn't stand a chance at all.

They can at least say that the inspired other companies to spoof their dream in this year's onslaught of April Fool's Day fake stories.

There you have it, the status report on Mars One's mission. I'll leave it up to you to decide what the progress grade is, but there is a little lesson that's worth ending on.

A trip to Mars will be difficult. It's hard to knock any company for not being even 1/10th of the way to launching a successful mission. But in Mars One's case, they are a good exception.

There is a fine line between a realistic mission to Mars and a "we're going to fly on unicorn blood" type of Mars mission. For some people, that line determines whether the whole concept is just a fool's errand or not.

A trip to Mars needs to live in the world of practical reality. This requires putting pen to paper, paper to prototypes, prototypes to testing, and testing the final execution.

For those individuals who finally do take on this great adventure, they are owed nothing less than as much perfection as humanly possible.

Maybe we'll get to Mars. Maybe Mars One will ultimately put their flag on Martian soil. The future is always open, but getting there is going to require practical and dedicated research and achievement.

[ How stressful will a trip to Mars be on the human body?]

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Austin Fracchia is a writer/speaker, photographer, and educator based in Longmont, Colorado. Through teaching and writing, he helps others overcome their communication fears and challenges so they can express their most important ideas and emotions. When he's not putting the digital pen to paper, he's outdoors enjoying the scenery of nature.

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What's Going On With Mars One These Days?

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Do you remember reading or hearing about that company that wanted to turn a mission to Mars into a reality show? They promised you, the viewer, a behind-the-scenes look as they selected, trained, and sent people to the red planet. It was a popular concept, considering 200,000 people applied.

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http://thedailyrecord.com/2017/09/27/lockheed-martin-to-debut-mars-lander-concept-at-iac-australia/

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SpaceX founder Elon Musk says he'll unveil "major improvements and some unexpected applications" this week when he updates his plan for sending thousands of settlers to Mars starting in the 2020s.

The update is coming in a talk Musk is giving to the International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide, Australia, set for about 9:30 p.m. PT Thursday (2 p.m. Friday in Adelaide). The IAC's organizers say the talk will be live-streamed. (Details to come.)

This week's talk follows up on Musk's appearance at the IAC last September in Mexico, during which he laid out a detailed plan to develop a new type of monster spaceship and booster for Mars trips, known as the Interplanetary Transport System or ITS.

The spaceship, which was nicknamed the BFS ("Big Freakin' Spaceship) or Heart of Gold (after the ship from "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"), would be designed to carry 100 passengers and cargo to Mars, fuel up on the Red Planet and return to Earth for the next mission. The booster would be similarly reusable.

Since last September, SpaceX has continued work on the methane-fueled Raptor rocket engine and other components needed for the ITS. But Musk has been hinting that the mission architecture would be downsized to make the project more affordable and accommodate other types of missions.

"I think this one's got a shot of being real on the economic front," he said in July.

Today, Musk said on Twitter and Instagram that some aspects of the updated design and its applications would be unexpected:

Presentation of @SpaceX Interplanetary Spaceship & Rocket design from 2016 https://t.co/3b1YWWmmxg

- Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 25, 2017

Major improvements & some unexpected applications to be unveiled on Friday at @IAC2017 in Australia

- Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 25, 2017

So what kinds of unexpected applications can we expect? The most reasonable candidates would be missions to the moon and its surroundings, known as cislunar space.

Cislunar missions are expected to become a priority for NASA under the Trump administration. The space agency is already talking up plans for a Deep Space Gateway that would go into lunar orbit and serve as a jumping-off point for robotic missions on the lunar surface as well as crewed flights to Mars and other farther-flung destinations.

United Launch Alliance, Orbital ATK, Boeing and Lockheed Martin all have drawn up concepts for deep-space gateways and lunar habitats. Meanwhile, Blue Origin, the space venture founded by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, is talking with NASA about a "Blue Moon" launch and landing system that could make robotic deliveries to the lunar surface.

SpaceX is likely to be looking for a piece of the action as well. It also has a plan on the books to send paying passengers around the moon by as early as next year (although later is far more likely). Cislunar applications for Musk's reworked Interplanetary Transport System seem so likely that it's hard to call them "unexpected."

Another possibility has to do with SpaceX's plan to put thousands of satellites into low Earth orbit to provide global internet access. The satellite system - which is being developed at SpaceX's offices in Redmond, Wash., and may be known as Starlink - would seem to require lots of launches. But it's not inconceivable that bunches of satellites could be deployed during a single orbital outing for ITS.

Yet another option would involve setting up a more lasting infrastructure for Martian settlement. Lockheed Martin, for example, is due to provide "late breaking news" about its Mars Base Camp concept at the Adelaide IAC meeting. Musk could conceivably lay out a plan that envisions more than mere back-and-forth rides for SpaceX's future customers.

Lockheed Martin's deputy project manager for NASA's Orion deep-space vehicle, Larry Price, says he welcomes SpaceX's interest in beyond-Earth exploration - a field that he expects NASA to pioneer for commercial follow-up.

"Elon is expanding more into this realm. ... It's all good, it's everybody getting excited about that possibility and developing where the market could be," Price told GeekWire last week during a visit to Aerojet Rocketdyne's facility in Redmond, Wash.

The current timetables point to a buildup toward crewed Mars missions within a decade or two. NASA's plan calls for sending astronauts to Mars and its moons in the mid-2030s. Lockheed Martin says its Mars Base Camp could be launched by 2028. And Musk has talked about starting up SpaceX's shuttle service to Mars in the mid-2020s.

Hear from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson, Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta, Amazon Alexa & Echo VP Toni Reid, Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center president Dr. Gary Gilliland and many other leading innovators at the 6th annual GeekWire Summit, taking place Oct. 9-11 in Seattle. Tickets on sale here.

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SpaceX's Elon Musk is setting up his fans for a surprise during Mars mission update

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SpaceX founder Elon Musk says he'll unveil "major improvements and some unexpected applications" this week when he updates his plan for sending thousands of settlers to Mars starting in the 2020s. The update is coming in a talk Musk is giving to the International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide, Australia, set for about 9:30 p.m.

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the latest plan. Sorry I forgot to add a picture

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Overview of Moon to Mars: NASA's plans to enable human exploration of the Moon as preparation for human missions to Mars and deeper into the solar system.

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(Image: © Lockheed Martin)

THE WOODLANDS, Texas - In 2028, a space station could be circling Mars, if a new concept comes to fruition. As a prelude to human expeditions to the planet's surface, researchers aboard the proposed orbiting lab would aim to answer key questions about the complex world.

The six-person Mars Base Camp is led by researchers at aerospace giant Lockheed Martin, who unveiled the concept last year and fleshed out more details of the project here at the 48th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC), held March 21-25. The Mars Base Camp is designed to vastly amplify the collection of imagery and scientific data from multiple sites on the planet over a full year of crewed occupation.

This work could help identify the best spots for humans to explore on the Martian surface, Lockheed Martin representatives have said. The station's inhabitants could also use virtual reality, immersive technology and artificial intelligence to drive advanced rovers and other craft on the Red Planet in real time. [ Mars Base Camp: Lockheed Martin Concept Video]

In addition, samples of rock and soil that robots such as NASA's upcoming 2020 Mars rover collect on the Martian surface could be launched to Mars Base Camp, where crewmembers could examine them for signs of Red Planet life, project team members have said.

Real-time operation

Since Lockheed Martin researchers unveiled the project, they have been brainstorming with scientists and engineers from a variety of institutions to refine the idea. Discussions at LPSC continued that work.

"The discussion we're having here at the meeting is, how best can scientific discovery be enabled by having scientists in close proximity to mobile hardware on the surface of Mars or in the Martian atmosphere," Steve Jolly, chief engineer for civil space at Lockheed Martin in Denver, told Space.com.

For example, a human field geologist on Mars would make quick decisions about which spots to explore, the best rock formations to study and where to dig for soil samples, Jolly said. "We want rovers under scientific control to behave in the same way."

That's not possible when Mars rovers and their handlers are on different planets. one to two days the duties that asaid Ben Clark, chief scientist on the Lockheed Martin team studying the Mars Base Camp.

Moreover, if the rover experiences a problem, there's a wait to find out what went wrong, followed by another wait as the issue is addressed, Clark told Space.com.

Mars Base Camp would minimize such delays, he said.

"We could be operating rovers on the surface in joystick mode from the Mars Base Camp, as opposed to the way we control rovers today," Clark said. [ Amazing Mars Photos by NASA's Curiosity Rover (Latest Images)]

Exploration tools

Mars Base Camp astronauts could also interact virtually with Mars surface robots, using technology like that developed at Lockheed Martin's Collaborative Human Immersive Laboratory, Jolly said.

Other high-tech tools could aid surface exploration as well, Jolly added. For example, tiny robots carrying small sensors could crawl down into lava tubes, rappel off cliffs or perform other specific tasks, he said.

In addition, Mars Base Camp would fly in a highly elliptical orbit that would allow it to "hover" over particular spots on the Red Planet for long stretches. During that time period, shifts of astronaut-scientists could execute tasks with surface robots and even aerial drones, Jolly said.

Exploration parties

On the Mars orbiting complex, crewmembers would be immersed in a continuous data flood from the rovers, and they'd have the feeling of being front and center on Mars, Clark said.

"They'll have such good imagery, they'll be able to make decisions as they go," while probing a zone of interest, he said. Mars Base Camp astronauts could cover large distances and even reconstruct, via images, areas in great detail, he said.

Clark foresees the use of avatars - electronic "Mars walkers" that are manipulated by a computer user in a virtual space. Those avatars could make up different field-exploration parties that tromp about virtually on the planet, he said.

"Wearing goggles on the Mars Base Camp, researchers can decide where they want to be ... point to another spot ... give the right gesture, and you sort of teleport yourself to another place you want to be," Clark said. "Your body didn't move, but the terrain moved to where you want to stand."

Boots on the ground

Jolly stressed that the Mars Base Camp is not a substitute for getting actual boots on the Red Planet.

"It's a precursor," Jolly said, pointing to other aspects of the Mars Base Camp scenario.

For example, Lockheed Martin has looked into developing a reusable sortie system to get astronauts from Mars Base Camp down to the surface and back to orbit again. A single-stage lander and ascent vehicle would enable two-week missions to Mars, with the ability to abort at any time.

Similarly, human excursions to Mars' two moons, Phobos and Deimos, are being assessed.

Indeed, the Mars Base Camp architecture could support a diversity of missions to low-gravity bodies, Earth's moon, Mars and beyond, Jolly said. The Lockheed Martin plan invites international partners to contribute ideas to this human-rated interplanetary exploration system.

"Now is the time to shape the future," Jolly said.
Leonard David is author of "Mars: Our Future on the Red Planet," published by National Geographic. The book is a companion to the National Geographic Channel series "Mars." A longtime writer for Space.com, David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

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'Mars Base Camp': Lockheed Fleshes Out Red Planet Space Station Plan

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(Image: © Lockheed Martin) THE WOODLANDS, Texas - In 2028, a space station could be circling Mars, if a new concept comes to fruition. As a prelude to human expeditions to the planet's surface, researchers aboard the proposed orbiting lab would aim to answer key questions about the complex world.

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Talks about the research NASA has done with the and the results are expected to return by the end of 2020s.

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NASA is examining options to launch a robotic mission as soon as 2026 to pick up rock specimens from the surface of Mars and bring them back to Earth, moving forward the timeline for a sample return mission as the agency postpones plans for a new Mars reconnaissance and data relay orbiter.

The sample return project is expected to cost several billion dollars, but the head of NASA's science division said Monday that international or commercial contributions to the effort could reduce the U.S. government's expense.

Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA's science mission directorate, outlined NASA's thinking in a presentation Monday at a National Academies meeting chartered to review the agency's progress achieving high-level science priorities identified in a 2011 decadal survey report.

He called the revamped sample return concept a "leaner architecture" than missions NASA previously studied. Setting a launch date as soon as 2026 goes "straight for what I would consider the jugular issue, which is how to land and take off the planet."

The last decadal survey report ranked a Mars sample return as the highest priority in planetary science. NASA will get started on the multi-mission program with the launch of the next Mars rover in July 2020.

While each Mars rover is fitted with an expanding array of miniature lab technology to conduct on-site rock analyses, instruments like scanning electron microscopes and synchrotrons are much too big to fit on an interplanetary spacecraft. Any discovery of past life on Mars, if it existed, is more likely to come from a ground laboratory.

The Mars 2020 rover will collect vials of soil and rock specimens and deposit them in sealed containers on the ground for retrieval by a future mission.

The next step would be to dispatch a lander to Mars with a small rocket booster to launch a carrier module with the surface samples back into space. The lander may also carry a fetch rover to pick up the sample tubes left behind by the Mars 2020 mission, or the Mars 2020 rover itself - if still operational - could load the specimens into the rocket, called the Mars Ascent Vehicle.

Proceeding with development of a Mars Ascent Vehicle and fetch rover for a launch in 2026 will strain NASA's planetary science budget.

The multibillion-dollar Europa Clipper mission is scheduled for launch in the early 2020s to make dozens of low-altitude flybys of Jupiter's ice-covered moon, and NASA is also studying a Europa lander that could launch later in the decade. Europa Clipper is an approved mission, while the lander is still awaiting a go-ahead from NASA Headquarters.

Moving up a Mars sample return mission will likely push back the launch of a new orbiter to the red planet. NASA has studied the proposed orbital craft, tentatively named Next Mars Orbiter, or NEMO, more than two years, but the orbiter never went beyond the conceptual phase.

NASA officials previously discussed launching the orbiter in late 2022, the next Mars launch opportunity after Mars 2020's launch. That is no longer likely to happen.

"2022 is probably off the table," said Jim Green, director of NASA's planetary science division, in a recent interview with Astronomy Now. "It would be too difficult to pull something together - that is an orbiter that has all the features that we had initially studied."

NASA considered two main objectives for the planned orbiter.

One goal was to relay radio signals between Earth and the fleet of rovers exploring the Martian surface. Fitted with an optical communications package, the orbiter would have the capacity to transfer rover science data at significantly higher rates, while replacing the relay capability currently provided by an aging orbiter constellation.

NASA also looked at attaching a sharp-eyed telescope to the orbiter to continue high-resolution imaging and mapping now provided by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which arrived at the planet in 2006.

"That high-resolution imaging is absolutely essential for anything that we need to put down on the ground, to get the imaging necessary to ensure a safe landing," Green said. "It's a fundamental feed-forward instrument, in addition to all the science that it does."

NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter is even older, now in its 16th year of operations.

The MAVEN science orbiter arrived at Mars in 2014 and hosts an Electra relay radio payload to connect ground controllers with Mars landers, and NASA provided Electra radios for the European Space Agency's ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, which has been circling Mars since October 2016.

MAVEN and TGO are not in optimal orbits to accommodate regular passes over NASA's rover landing sites, but officials are considering adjusting MAVEN's orbit for more favourable relays, a decision researchers say would sacrifice some of MAVEN's scientific output on the Martian atmosphere.

Engineers could theoretically communicate directly with Mars rovers from ground-based antennas, but the signals would be dropped when the landing sites face away from Earth during each Martian day. Bits of science data, including high-resolution imagery, would also take longer to reach Earth via a direct link.

MRO is expected to run out of fuel by 2024 or 2025, Green said.

"You can't stop it, and that ends the mission," Green said. "Then that ends our high-resolution imaging, and then that ends our relay. Those are critical things we want to do, but we can't do everything either. We also want to bring samples back.

"That requires a Mars Ascent Vehicle," he said.

Filmgoers who saw The Martian, a 2015 movie about an astronaut stranded on the red planet, are familiar with a Mars Ascent Vehicle. A sample launcher that could be ready to go to Mars in the 2020s will be much smaller than the rocket featured in the film.

"The Mars Ascent Vehicle that they had, I would die for that one, but we don't have any at the moment," Green said. "And Mars is a different planet. We've got to get off of it, and the way to do that is to start with smaller systems that can take a few kilograms of samples off the surface and get it up to an altitude where we can capture it and bring the samples back. That's tough. So we also have to invest in concepts in that area."

The retrieval mission must also land near the samples cached by the Mars 2020 rover, requiring precision landing technology.

Once the samples are hurled into orbit around Mars, another spacecraft would rendezvous with the carrier to retrieve the specimens for return to Earth.

Zurbuchen suggested an international or commercial partner could build the craft to shepherd the samples back. NASA has not decided whether the capsule containing the Mars material will head directly to Earth, or potentially loiter in an orbit near the moon, where astronauts aboard a planned deep space station could collect the samples for return inside an Orion crew capsule.

In his presentation Monday, Zurbuchen said a sample return mission launched in 2026 could be mounted without sending a new orbiter to Mars. MAVEN and Europe's TGO mission have enough fuel to last beyond 2026, and the Earth return craft sent to Mars to bring the samples home could also carry a telecom relay radio.

Mars advocates have highlighted the need to extend NASA's Mars telecom relay capacity after the current orbiters are gone.

"Assuming Odyssey ends by 2020, NASA will have MRO and two sub-par options for relay (in terms of their orbits, not their communications ability)," Casey Dreier, director of space policy at the Planetary Society, wrote in an email to Astronomy Now.

"If their internal analysis says that they can rely on that setup through the mid-2020s, then I believe them, but then they must pursue a sample return mission as soon as possible in order to be able to depend on these aging assets," Dreier wrote.

If the sample return mission launches later in the 2020s, NASA may need to re-examine the architecture introduced Monday, Zurbuchen said, perhaps in favor of developing an orbiter first.

"Given that 2022 seems to be 'out' for an orbiter, and that NASA seems to be angling for a sample return mission instead of a telecom orbiter anyway, the impetus shifts for sample return to begin as soon as possible in order to take advantage of the existing telecom capability," Dreier wrote.

Dreier said he is "generally supportive" of the plan presented Monday by Zurbuchen.

"But in a practical sense, the orbital Mars community will be facing tough times ahead with a dearth of missions for at least the next decade, if not more," he wrote.

There is still an opening for another Mars orbiter that could launch by 2026. Competitions for relatively low-cost Discovery-class robotic interplanetary missions occur every few years, and scientists are free to propose a Mars orbiter.

But such a mission would need to have a compelling scientific rationale, with telecom relay only a secondary concern. A Mars mission would also compete against proposals for probes to the moon, comets and asteroids, and other planets.

Zurbuchen said NASA is also looking at purchasing Mars communications relay services from the private sector. NASA issued a request for information from industry in 2014 seeking ideas for how the agency could use commercial providers for Mars telecom.

SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk said last month his company was interested in working with NASA on Mars communications. Meanwhile, SpaceX's plan to launch an unpiloted Dragon capsule in 2020 to land on Mars has been postponed, or perhaps scrapped entirely, as the company redefines the way it seeks to send commercial transporters with cargo, and eventually humans, to the red planet.

NASA is eyeing a government-funded human mission to Mars in the 2030s, assuming the agency can secure a budget for the project.

Green said NASA is weighing several ideas it received in the 2014 request for information on commercial Mars relays, but he stressed that potential commercial partners must be ready to meet the agency's requirements.

"We're considering a couple of those things, and that needs to be folded in," Green told Spaceflight Now. "Commercial activities need to be folded in to the best of our ability, but I have to tell you they have to be realistic and they have to actually execute.

"There is a lot of talk about these kinds of things, but guess what? We're the ones going to Mars. We're the ones that are landing on Mars. We know how hard Mars is. ESA knows how hard Mars is. This doesn't make it easy, so the more the merrier. We love the partnerships, but everybody has got to follow through to have these kinds of things come to fruition."

In reference to relying on a commercial transporter to bring Mars samples back to Earth, Zurbuchen echoed Green's concerns, saying there will be "no compromise" on the agency's stringent cleanliness and planetary protection standards aimed at ensuring the specimens are not contaminated on the trip home.
Email the author. Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @StephenClark1.

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NASA studies mission to return samples from Mars by end of 2020s

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NASA is examining options to launch a robotic mission as soon as 2026 to pick up rock specimens from the surface of Mars and bring them back to Earth, moving forward the timeline for a sample return mission as the agency postpones plans for a new Mars reconnaissance and data relay orbiter.

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Wageningen / London, February 24th, 2017 - The Imperial College in London is going to investigate if bacteria will survive in the Mars and Moon soil simulant in cooperation with Wageningen University & Research in March 2017. To be able to live on Mars or the Moon, humans will need to grow their own food. One of the key factors in plant growth and recycling of dead plant parts are bacteria. They break down the dead leaves, roots and stems and thus make nutrients, manure, available again for plant growth. Completing this cycle is essential for sustainable crop growth on Mars. "With this next step we are moving from just growing crops to building a small but sustainable ecosystem", said Dr. ir. Wieger Wamelink of Wageningen University & Research and a Mars One adviser.

The experimental work will be carried out by Dr. Maaike van Agtmaal, a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Division of Ecology and Evolution of the Imperial College in London. Soon she will start her first measurements. First, the Mars and Moon soil simulant is sterilised to make sure no bacteria are present. Then the simulant soil will be inoculated with bacteria from different agricultural soils and placed in microcosms. The activity of the bacteria will be monitored. "My aim is to study the process of terraforming of soils, the process of making soil habitable. We will therefore also compare the results from the simulants with Sahara sand and Arctic soil and with sterilised soil simulant without bacteria", Van Agtmaal said. The experiment will last one month during which samples will be taken every week to observe which bacteria can enter the soil, see if they survive and test which essential soil functions they can bring.

One of the essentials for plant growth are nutrients as nitrogen, phosphorous potassium or calcium. These nutrients will be taken up by plants, resulting in growth. However, this will deplete the nutrient stock in the soil. For this reason, dead plant parts that are not eaten have to be returned to the soil, just like the faeces and urine of the humans. The nutrients in the dead plant parts will not be released to the soil, unless bacteria break down the dead plant material first. They feed from the dead plants, meanwhile releasing the nutrients for the plants. "We have been growing crops on Mars and Moon soil simulant for several years now", Wamelink explains, "and we have demonstrated that it is possible to harvest over a dozen different crops including tomatoes, green beans, potatoes, carrots and radishes. These are important ingredients for a healthy and tasty diet for future Mars settlers. However, the harvest is still less than from crops grown on earth potting soil. This could be due to a lower bacterial activity and this experiment may reveal this."

Bas Lansdorp, CEO and co-founder of Mars One: "For our mission of permanent settlement on Mars, growing food locally is very important. While our astronauts will bring storable food from Earth, they will try to eat as much fresh food that they produce on Mars as possible, increasing their independency from supplies from Earth and increasing the quality of life. Mars One is particularly interested in this research as it could mean an important step towards producing food more efficiently on Mars."
About Maaike van Agtmaal, PhD
Maaike van Agtmaal is a soil microbial ecologist whose research focuses on experimentally testing the role of soil bacterial diversity on various soil functions in the lab and in the field. She is intrigued by microbial interactions in soil, and the effect which these small scale processes could have on ecosystem functioning. She works as postdoctoral researcher at Imperial College London on the Ugrass project: 'understanding and enhancing soil ecosystem services and resilience in UK grass and croplands' which is part of the Soil Security Program of the UK.

Maaike van Agtmaal, Imperial College London

[email protected], +44 20 759 42317 / +44 7821495624
About Dr. ir. Wieger Wamelink
Dr. ir. Wieger Wamelink, a Mars One adviser, is a senior ecologist at Wageningen Environmental Science at Wageningen University & Research (the Netherlands). He has made significant scientific contributions to the understanding of the possibilities of using Martian soil for food production on Mars, a key component of the Mars One mission.

Wieger Wamelink has over 20 years of experience in experimental, field and modelling ecology after graduating as a plant breeder with speciality of plant physiology. He has (co-) authored more than 150 scientific publications and has appeared in many tv and radio shows and in many newspapers and other media. Wieger Wamelink collaborates with other departments within Wageningen University & Research including the department of Mars One adviser Prof. Dr. Leo Marcelis.

Wieger Wamelink, Wageningen University & Research

[email protected], +31 317 485917

For more information about the Food for Mars experiments, please go to community.mars-one.com/blog/category/wieger-wamelink
Photos of the Mars Moon experiments can be found here: facebook.com/pg/Food.for.Mars.and.moon/photos
For an overview of the Mars Moon experiment, please go to youtube.com/watch?v=TgKsYtVuR80
About Wageningen University & Research
Wageningen UR is a collaboration between Wageningen University and the DLO foundation. 'To explore the potential of nature to improve the quality of life'. That is the mission of Wageningen UR (University & Research centre). A staff of 6,500 and 10,000 students from over 100 countries work everywhere around the world in the domain of healthy food and living environment for governments and the business community-at-large. The scientific quality of Wageningen UR is affirmed by the prominent position they occupy in international rankings and citation indexes.

For more information about Wageningen University & Research, please visit www.wur.nl.
About Mars One
Mars One aims to establish a permanent human settlement on Mars. Before carefully selected and trained crews will depart to Mars, several unmanned missions will be completed, establishing a habitable settlement waiting for the first astronauts to arrive.

Mars One consists of two entities: the not-for-profit Mars One Foundation and the publicly trading Mars One Ventures AG [FRA: KCC], ISIN: CH0132106482. The Mars One Foundation implements, and manages the mission and owns the mission hardware. It also selects and trains the crews, and is building an ever growing community of experts and supporters that follow the progress of the mission and contribute to it.

Mars One Ventures holds the exclusive monetization rights around the Mars One mission. There are many revenue possibilities around the mission to Mars: merchandise, ads on video content, broadcasting rights, partnerships, Intellectual Property, events, games, apps, and many more.

For more information about Mars One, please visit www.mars-one.com.

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Can bacteria survive in Mars soil and thus enhance crop production? - Press Releases - News - Mars One

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One of the key factors in plant growth and recycling of dead plant parts are bacteria. The Imperial College in London is going to investigate if bacteria will survive in Mars soil simulant in cooperation with Wageningen University & Research.

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Elon Musk has put his Mars-colonization vision to paper, and you can read it for free.

SpaceX's billionaire founder and CEO just published the plan, which he unveiled at a conference in Mexico in September 2016, in the journal New Space. Musk's commentary, titled "Making Humanity a Multi-Planetary Species," is available for free on New Space's website through July 5.

"In my view, publishing this paper provides not only an opportunity for the spacefaring community to read the SpaceX vision in print with all the charts in context, but also serves as a valuable archival reference for future studies and planning," New Space editor-in-chief (and former NASA "Mars czar") Scott Hubbard wrote in a statement. [ SpaceX's Interplanetary Transport for Mars in Images]

Musk's Mars vision centers on a reusable rocket-and-spaceship combo that he's dubbed the Interplanetary Transport System (ITS). Both the booster and the spaceship will be powered by SpaceX's Raptor engine, still in development, which Musk said will be about three times stronger than the Merlin engines that power the company's Falcon 9 rocket.

The booster, with its 42 Raptors, will be the most powerful rocket in history, by far. It will be capable of launching 300 metric tons (330 tons) to low Earth orbit (LEO), or 550 metric tons (600 tons) in an expendable variant, Musk said. For comparison, NASA's famous Saturn V moon rocket, the current record holder, could loft "just" 135 metric tons (150 tons).

(Image credit: SpaceX)

ITS rockets will launch the spaceships to Earth orbit, then come back down for a pinpoint landing about 20 minutes later. And "pinpoint" is not hyperbole: "With the addition of maneuvering thrusters, we think we can actually put the booster right back on the launch stand," Musk wrote in his New Space paper, citing SpaceX's increasingly precise Falcon 9 first-stage landings.

The ITS boosters will launch many spaceships and fuel tankers (which will top up the spaceships' tanks) to orbit over the course of their operational lives; the rockets will be designed to fly about 1,000 times each, Musk wrote. The spaceships, meanwhile, will hang out in orbit, and then depart en masse when Earth and Mars align favorably. This happens once every 26 months.

Eventually, Musk wrote, he envisions 1,000 or more ITS spaceships, each carrying 100 or more people, leaving Earth orbit during each of these Mars windows. The architecture could conceivably get 1 million people to Mars within the next 50 to 100 years, he has said.

The ships would also fly back from Mars, using their nine Raptor engines and methane-based propellant that was manufactured on the Red Planet. Each ITS ship would probably be able to make 12 to 15 deep-space journeys during its operational life, Musk wrote, and each fuel tanker could likely fly to Earth orbit 100 or so times.

The ITS' reusability is key to making Mars colonization affordable. This reusability - combined with other measures, such as fueling the spaceships in Earth orbit and making propellant on Mars - could bring the price of a Red Planet trip down to $200,000 or so per person, from an estimated $10 billion using conventional spaceflight systems, Musk said.

ITS spaceships could begin flying to Mars about 10 years from now, if everything goes well, Musk added. But he acknowledged that success is far from guaranteed.

"There is a huge amount of risk. It is going to cost a lot," Musk wrote. "There is a good chance we will not succeed, but we are going to do our best and try to make as much progress as possible."

And SpaceX has a history of overcoming long odds. When Musk founded the company in 2002, he wrote, "I thought we had maybe a 10 percent chance of doing anything - of even getting a rocket to orbit, let alone getting beyond that and taking Mars seriously."

You can download a free copy of Musk's Mars paper here: http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/space.2017.29009.emu

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SpaceX's Mars Colony Plan: How Elon Musk Plans to Build a Million-Person Martian City

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Elon Musk has put his Mars-colonization vision to paper, and you can read it for free. SpaceX's billionaire founder and CEO just published the plan, which he unveiled at a conference in Mexico in September 2016, in the journal New Space.

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A SpaceX Dragon cargo ship returned to Earth today (Sept. 17) after a one-month stay at the International Space Station. At 10:16 a.m. EDT (1416 GMT), the Dragon splashed down in the Pacific Ocean loaded with more than 3,800 lbs. (1,700 kilograms) of cargo.

NASA astronaut Randy Bresnik and the European Space Agency's Paolo Nespoli released the Dragon from the Harmony module early this morning, at 4:47 a.m. EDT (0847 GMT), using the Canadarm2 robotic arm. The Dragon then fired its thrusters to separate from the space station.

Once the Dragon spacecraft was a safe distance from the orbiting laboratory, SpaceX flight controllers in Hawthorne, California, sent the command for the Dragon to begin its deorbit burn. Roughly 5.5 hours later, the Dragon splashed down off the coast of Baja, California, where SpaceX personnel aboard a recovery vessel picked up the spacecraft to bring it back to a shipping port near Los Angeles. [ Gallery: Dragon, SpaceX's Private Spacecraft]

.@Astro_Paolo and @AstroKomrade released @SpaceX #Dragon with Canadarm2 at 4:40am ET today for return to Earth. https://t.co/5rHQlLLgWo pic.twitter.com/PhQkutEWdN
- Intl. Space Station (@Space_Station) September 17, 2017

The Dragon arrived at the space station on Aug. 16 packed with more than 6,400 lbs. (2,900 kg) of food, supplies and science experiments for the Expedition 52 crew. Science equipment on board included a protein-crystal growth experiment to research a new treatment for Parkinson's disease, another experiment for growing lung tissue from stem cells and 20 mice that would demonstrate the physiological effects of spaceflight. NASA also sent up some ice cream for the astronauts.

For the vessel's return trip, the crew loaded the Dragon with "science samples from human and animal research, biology and biotechnology studies, physical science investigations, and education activities," NASA officials said in a statement.

SpaceX's first Dragon capsule to visit the International Space Station bobs in the Pacific Ocean after a successful splashdown that capped its successful test flight on May 31, 2012. The capsule landed off the coast of Baja California.

Credit: SpaceX/Michael Altenhofen

"NASA and the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS), the nonprofit organization that manages research aboard the U.S. national laboratory portion of the space station, will receive time-sensitive samples and begin working with researchers to process and distribute them within 48 hours of splashdown," the statement said.

This was the 12th contracted cargo resupply mission (CRS-12) for SpaceX. While this was a brand-new Dragon capsule at the time of launch, SpaceX officials said they plan to launch only used cargo spacecraft to the space station from now on. This was the last new Dragon to deliver cargo to the space station.

Email Hanneke Weitering at hweitering@space.com or follow her @hannekescience. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebookand Google+. Original article on Space.com.

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SpaceX Dragon Cargo Craft Splashes Down in Pacific Ocean

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A SpaceX Dragon cargo ship returned to Earth today (Sept. 17) after a one-month stay at the International Space Station. At 10:16 a.m. EDT (1416 GMT), the Dragon splashed down in the Pacific Ocean loaded with more than 3,800 lbs. (1,700 kilograms) of cargo.

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Elon Musk revealed the Spaceship Interplanetary Spaceship and Rocket at last year's International Astronautical Congress (embedded below), detailing a very ambitious plan to get humans to Mars - and to help them stay there and colonize, and even commercialize, the red planet. This Friday, he'll reveal updated details on SpaceX's interplanetary plans.

Last year's presentation detailed Musk's Mars ambitions in more detail than ever previously revealed, including the physical design of the rocket and spacecraft that would ferry cargo and crew to the planet. It also showed a bit of information about how he hoped to pay for the trip, though a lot of that was still left an open question by the end of the plan. Mostly, Musk hoped to decrease costs exponentially through advances like the reusable rocketry that it such a massive part of SpaceX's business model.

Musk teased not only "major improvements" to be revealed at this year's IAC, along with some new, "unexpected applications" of the interplanetary launch system. These are the ones to watch: The big focus last year was still on how SpaceX intended to pay for the incredibly ambitious plan, and additional applications of the tech, including for potentially lucrative commercial purposes, could help.

We may also get some more info on SpaceX's proposed plan to launch and operate its own constellation of satellites providing low-cost broadband around the world, which is another way the company hopes to drive revenue. SpaceX recently filed for a trademark likely related to this project. We'll have all the news on TechCrunch as it happens.

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Elon Musk to detail updates and new uses for SpaceX's interplanetary rocket

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Elon Musk revealed the Spaceship Interplanetary Spaceship and Rocket at last year's International Astronautical Congress (embedded below), detailing a very ambitious plan to get humans to Mars - and to help them stay there and colonize, and even commercialize, the red planet. This Friday, he'll reveal updated details on SpaceX's interplanetary plans.

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Washington: NASA's next mission to Mars, scheduled to launch next year, will focus on examining the deep interior of the red planet, according to the US space agency.

Information gathered by the Insight mission will boost understanding of how all rocky planets formed, including Earth, NASA said. "Because the interior of Mars has churned much less than Earth's in the past three billion years, Mars likely preserves evidence about rocky planets' infancy better than our home planet does," said InSight Principal Investigator Bruce Banerdt of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California.

The mission will place a stationary lander near Mars' equator. With two solar panels that unfold like paper fans, the lander spans about six metres. Within weeks after the landing, InSight will use a robotic arm to place its two main instruments directly and permanently onto the martian ground, an unprecedented set of activities on Mars, according to NASA.

One of the two instruments is a seismometer, which is shielded from wind, and has sensitivity fine enough to detect ground movements half the diameter of a hydrogen atom. It will record seismic waves from "marsquakes" or meteor impacts that reveal information about the planet's interior layers.

The other instrument is a heat probe, designed to hammer itself to a depth of three metres or more and measure the amount of energy coming from the planet's deep interior. A third experiment will use radio transmissions between Mars and Earth to assess perturbations in how Mars rotates on its axis, which are clues about the size of the planet's core.

Preparation ramped up this summer for the InSight mission which is on course for launch next May from Vandenberg Air Force Base in central California, NASA said. "Our team resumed system-level integration and test activities last month," said Stu Spath, spacecraft programme manager at Lockheed Martin.

"The lander is completed and instruments have been integrated onto it so that we can complete the final spacecraft testing including acoustics, instrument deployments and thermal balance tests," Spath said.

The spacecraft's science payload also is on track for next year's launch, NASA said. The mission's launch was originally planned for March 2016, but was called off due to a leak into a metal container designed to maintain near-vacuum conditions around the seismometer's main sensors.

A redesigned vacuum vessel for the instrument has been built and tested, then combined with the instrument's other components and tested again. "We have fixed the problem we had two years ago, and we are eagerly preparing for launch," said InSight Project Manager Tom Hoffman, of JPL.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

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NASA's Next Mars Mission To Probe Red Planet's Deep Interior

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Washington: NASA's next mission to Mars, scheduled to launch next year, will focus on examining the deep interior of the red planet, according to the US space agency. Information gathered by the Insight mission will boost understanding of how all rocky planets formed, including Earth, NASA said.

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In Brief

SpaceX has taken a bureaucratic step forward in its plans to launch a network of satellites to give global internet access. The $10 billion dollar plan is expected to be a major source of funding for the space exploration company.

SpaceX seems to be taking a step forward in its plan to provide low-cost global internet access via a network of satellites. According to a report from GeekWire, SpaceX has filed to trademark the name "Starlink" for the network. CEO Elon Musk first announced his intention to begin the project back in 2015. More detailed plans were laid out in May, including the intention to launch 4,425 satellites into orbit between 2019 and 2024.

Musk estimated that the network could cost upward of $10 billion to get started, but foresees it as a major source of revenue for the company once it is up and running.

Musk is expected to announce more on the progress of the project when he speaks at the International Astronautical Congress in Australia next week.

This network is potentially world-changing, in its ability to provide internet access to parts of the world where land-based communications infrastructure is difficult or impossible to build. However, it is not the only project in the running. The Virginia-based OneWeb, which aims to have an operational network as early as 2019, is racing to get their satellites launched. Boeing is building satellites for SES, one of the world's largest satellite operators, which is planning a medium Earth orbit network.

Overall, this race to establish satellite internet networks should prove positive, as internet access can have a democratizing effect. Expanding access to the most in need for it will be a huge step in ensuring a better world.

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SpaceX files trademark documents for its global Internet network

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In Brief SpaceX has taken a bureaucratic step forward in its plans to launch a network of satellites to give global internet access. The $10 billion dollar plan is expected to be a major source of funding for the space exploration company.

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In Brief

As astronauts and scientists gear up for the next Mars mission, NASA's Human Research Program (HRP) strives to protect the human body from space radiation, one of the primary health risks for astronauts.

Space Radiation

Space radiation is among the primary health risks astronauts face when journeying into space. As the HI-SEAS mission V crew emerges from its latest isolation training experiment, and the world waits for the next SpaceX mission to Mars update, NASA's Human Research Program (HRP) is working to guard the human body from harm caused by space radiation.

"Determining astronaut health consequences following radiation exposure involve very complex processes," NASA research physicist Tony Slaba said in a NASA feature. "It's difficult to quantify exactly how radiation is interacting with tissues and cells - and more complicated to quantify and determine what long-term outcomes are going to be in terms of the potential diseases and biological system effects."

Radiation can harm virtually any cell in the body. The HRP is researching the entire range of long-term health consequences of radiation exposure, including cancer and adverse effects to the cardiovascular and central nervous systems. Space radiation can narrow and harden arteries, damage the heart, and cause cardiovascular disease by eliminating cells in the linings of the blood vessels. Radiation exposure can also hamper neurogenesis by damaging or killing existing neurons faster than the body can repair or replace them. This can result in memory deficits and cognitive impairment.

"The primary means by which radiation effects cells is by damaging DNA - breaks in strands could be experienced," Peter Guida, NASA Space Radiation Laboratory liaison biologist, said in the NASA feature, noting that DNA bases themselves can also be knocked out. "The cell will make an attempt to repair these damages. Sometimes it's effective and sometimes it's not, and sometimes it can be misrepaired. Genes that have been misrepaired can become mutations, and the accumulation of these mutations over time can potentially lead to cancer."

Space Radiation is Unique

Although some of these consequences are similar to the effects of radiation on Earth, studying and countering space radiation is a unique challenge.

"In space, outside Earth's protective magnetic field and atmosphere, there is a very complex radiation field of protons, and all the elements on the periodic table are coming in at energies approaching the speed of light," Slaba said in the NASA feature. "Exposure to radiation in space is quite different than exposure to radiation on Earth (like X-rays and gamma rays)."

The HRP's focus is on solutions that will protect astronauts such as those that take on the next Mars mission. Concepts being researched to prevent long-term damage include faster rockets, to reduce the time spent in space, pharmaceutical countermeasures, and shielding materials for habitats, space suits, and transport vehicles.

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As Mars mission approaches, NASA works to assess risks from space radiation

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In Brief As astronauts and scientists gear up for the next Mars mission, NASA's Human Research Program (HRP) strives to protect the human body from space radiation, one of the primary health risks for astronauts. Space radiation is among the primary health risks astronauts face when journeying into space.

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NASA has identified locations humans can live and key characteristics of the humans that they think would be most suited for this.

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NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS) - Human Mars Mission Overview and Dust Storm Impacts on Site Selection

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NASA has begun a process to identify and discuss candidate locations where humans could land, live and work on the martian surface.

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Article entitled "Living On Mars: The Stuff You Never Thought About."
Talks about technical issues that the organization Mars One might have to address

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Late Friday night-Saturday in Adelaide, Australia where the speech will occur-Elon Musk will give a presentation at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) meeting about his "updated" plans for a rocket system that will take humans to Mars. On Twitter, Musk has promised to discuss the "planetary colonizer design" in detail.

This speech follows a similar talk at last year's IAC meeting, in which Musk unveiled the "Interplanetary Transport System" design, with a massive 42-engine rocket capable of hefting as much as 550 tons to low Earth orbit-or about four times the amount of NASA's Moon rocket, the Saturn V launch vehicle. This reusable launch system, he said, could begin taking humans to Mars by the mid-2020s.

It was an audacious claim. The proposed spaceship would stand 50 meters tall, atop its rocket, with a maximum diameter of 17 meters. Instead of departing Earth orbit at 4.5km/s, its six Raptor engines optimized for the vacuum of space would accelerate it to 6 km/s, cutting the journey to Mars from six months to about three. After launching and being fueled on orbit, the ITS could deliver 100 tons to the surface of Mars. The largest payload NASA-or anyone-has ever safely landed on the Martian surface is the Curiosity rover, which weighs less than a single ton.

While the 2016 speech presented an ambitious and bold vision to send humans to inhabit the red planet, it was almost too fantastical. The rocket was too massive to be believable. There was no roadmap for raising the funds to build it (only some jokes, such as "sell underpants"). It all seemed a bit mad.

The update

For this year, we might expect more realism. Already, Musk has suggested the big rocket will be scaled down to a 9-meter diameter, which would fit inside SpaceX's existing rocket factory. By scaling back to 9 meters, Musk likely intends to remove the outer ring of 21 Raptor engines, leaving a vehicle with 21 engines instead of the original 42. While still complicated to manage during launch and flight, 21 engines seems more reasonable. Such a vehicle would also have about 50 percent less mass.

Not much else is known about other changes Musk will announce, other than that he believes the design "feels right." Perhaps we will see an architecture that starts with a rocket powered by 10 or so Raptor engines, that can scale up to a 21-engine Mars rocket. This smaller version would be commercially viable with other heavy lift rockets coming online in the next five years, including Blue Origin's New Glenn booster.

What to watch

For me, the interesting parts won't be the rocket design. Rather, I want to see how Musk and SpaceX get to Mars from here. It is easy to show dazzling graphics, videos of large rockets lifting off, and people smiling on Mars. It is quite another thing to design the rocket, obtain the funding to build it, and negotiate the regulatory hurdles of launching cargo and people to another world. (It's important to remember that no commercial company has ever sent humans into orbit, or cargo beyond low-Earth orbit).

So how will Musk pay for development of the Mars rocket? My guess is that SpaceX will follow its tried and true path. There will be some private investment-SpaceX continues to trend upward in private market valuations thanks to its growing dominance in the commercial satellite launch market-but we can expect the company to continue to leverage government contracts as well.

NASA is building its own heavy lift vehicle, the Space Launch System, to power human missions to the Moon and Mars. How will Musk's vehicle fit into that equation? Perhaps most importantly, the US Air Force is looking to develop a new generation of boosters in the mid-2020s, and it has been awarding hundreds of millions of dollars in Rocket Propulsion System grants. Will Musk's hardware fulfill the military's needs for a powerful rocket to deliver heavy satellites to geostationary space?

These are the questions we hope to see answered by Musk on Friday night. We plan to have a full report published by Saturday morning, so check back then.

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Here's what to look for in Elon Musk's big rocket speech Friday

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Late Friday night-Saturday in Adelaide, Australia where the speech will occur-Elon Musk will give a presentation at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) meeting about his "updated" plans for a rocket system that will take humans to Mars. On Twitter, Musk has promised to discuss the "planetary colonizer design" in detail.

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"Mars is simply the next continent humans will settle," mused Bas Lansdorp, chief executive of Mars One, in an interview with CNBC on Monday.

Lansdorp is one of a growing number of entrepreneurs aiming to send humans to Mars and create a human settlement on the red planet in the next few years but his company is very different from Elon Musk's SpaceX.

Mars One is split into two companies; the not-for-profit Mars One Foundation and the Frankfurt Stock Exchange-listed Mars One Ventures, which you can buy shares in. It is not building its own rockets or equipment but instead contracting other companies like Lockheed Martin to make the technology needed. Lansdorp even said the firm has had talks with SpaceX about buying one of its rockets.

If space travel is going to take off, then it seems suppliers like Airbus and Boeing might be better investments for investors. But Lansdorp said investors wanting a piece of Mars One are buying into a content company, not a technology firm.

"Buying into Mars One, is buying into content, while buying into Boeing or Airbus is buying into technology. I think that throughout last 30 years, we see that content has become more valuable. High impact content like the Olympics, Formula 1 and big blockbuster movies are going up in value. That is exactly what Mars One is," Lansdorp said.

"Content is one of the highest value commodities around at the moment."

He is not wrong. Netflix said it planned to spend $6 billion on content this year, an increase from the year before.

In a separate TV interview with CNBC on Monday, Lansdorp compared the content that Mars One will produce as being as successful as major films like Disney's "Frozen". The idea is to create shows that Mars One can sell. Firstly, Mars One will produce content around the selection of the four astronauts that will go to Mars in 2032 - the current scheduled year for the first manned mission. Lansdorp described this as "super interesting content" but admitted that the first programs are more about raising awareness around the brand and mission rather than making money.

Will it take off?

However, Mars One has had many critics since it was founded in 2011. Joseph Roche, an applicant to become an astronaut for the company, said the company had far fewer applications than the 200,000 it claimed. In 2015, he spoke out against the selection process and accused the company of selecting its top 10 candidates based on how much money they donated to the company. In a statement at the time, Lansdorp said the allegations were "not true" and maintained that there were 200,000 candidates.

"This was really a nonsense story about Mars One, and anyone can check it. On our community platform you can find people who dropped out in the first round while they made significant contributions to Mars One. You can also find that 60 person of our current round 3 candidates have never contributed a single dollar to Mars One beyond the small application fee they paid. And that is fine: we select our candidates for their quality, not based on what they contribute," Lansdorp told CNBC in a follow-up email.

Another setback came that same year when Mars One couldn't reach an agreement with Endemol, a production company behind reality TV show "Big Brother", to create a program around the astronaut selection and training process.

And in 2014, a research paper by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology questioned the feasibility of Mars One's mission, suggesting that the first settlers would die within a few months. The research also cast doubt over the mission's $6 billion budget and said there would need to be significant improvements to landing technology.

Bryan Versteeg | Mars One

Lansdorp said that the mission can be done in that budget because there is no return trip to earth which would have added significant costs. It has so far raised about 6 million euros via its stock exchange listing. The CEO also admitted that landing technology does need to be "scaled up" to account for the Mars atmosphere, but current technologies being tested by the likes of SpaceX could be used. Lansdorp did say there were big challenges in developing new space suits to survive Mars however.

The mission is also reliant on people leaving earth and never coming back. But Lansdorp compared it to previous human exploration endeavors.

"It's comparable to the exploration of the earth, be it Europeans migrating to the U.S. on a one way boat ticket or maybe a better comparison is people in west of Africa settling across the world on all continents in 40,000 years," Lansdorp told CNBC.

'Change the world'

The criticism has not stopped the entrepreneur's determination and believes that when people see how hard it is to live on Mars, which is the second most habitable place in our solar system, it will spur them to take care of earth more and hopefully inspire people into education.

"It will change the world more than we can imagine right now. It will bring people on earth closer together, it will inspire people to pursue more education to start a new company, inspire kids to become astronauts again," Lansdorp said.

"The most important thing is that by going to Mars, which is the second best place for humans to live in the solar system, by going to Mars and showing Earth how bad the second best planet is, will change the way humans look after this planet."

Clarification: This article has been updated since first published following clarification from Mars One.

Follow CNBC International on Twitter and Facebook.

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Like Elon Musk, this CEO is betting on Mars but his business model is more Disney than SpaceX

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"Mars is simply the next continent humans will settle," mused Bas Lansdorp, chief executive of Mars One, in an interview with CNBC on Monday. Lansdorp is one of a growing number of entrepreneurs aiming to send humans to Mars and create a human settlement on the red planet in the next few years but his company is very different from Elon Musk's SpaceX.

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(Image: © Lockheed Martin)

THE WOODLANDS, Texas - In 2028, a space station could be circling Mars, if a new concept comes to fruition. As a prelude to human expeditions to the planet's surface, researchers aboard the proposed orbiting lab would aim to answer key questions about the complex world.

The six-person Mars Base Camp is led by researchers at aerospace giant Lockheed Martin, who unveiled the concept last year and fleshed out more details of the project here at the 48th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC), held March 21-25. The Mars Base Camp is designed to vastly amplify the collection of imagery and scientific data from multiple sites on the planet over a full year of crewed occupation.

This work could help identify the best spots for humans to explore on the Martian surface, Lockheed Martin representatives have said. The station's inhabitants could also use virtual reality, immersive technology and artificial intelligence to drive advanced rovers and other craft on the Red Planet in real time. [ Mars Base Camp: Lockheed Martin Concept Video]

In addition, samples of rock and soil that robots such as NASA's upcoming 2020 Mars rover collect on the Martian surface could be launched to Mars Base Camp, where crewmembers could examine them for signs of Red Planet life, project team members have said.

Real-time operation

Since Lockheed Martin researchers unveiled the project, they have been brainstorming with scientists and engineers from a variety of institutions to refine the idea. Discussions at LPSC continued that work.

"The discussion we're having here at the meeting is, how best can scientific discovery be enabled by having scientists in close proximity to mobile hardware on the surface of Mars or in the Martian atmosphere," Steve Jolly, chief engineer for civil space at Lockheed Martin in Denver, told Space.com.

For example, a human field geologist on Mars would make quick decisions about which spots to explore, the best rock formations to study and where to dig for soil samples, Jolly said. "We want rovers under scientific control to behave in the same way."

That's not possible when Mars rovers and their handlers are on different planets. one to two days the duties that asaid Ben Clark, chief scientist on the Lockheed Martin team studying the Mars Base Camp.

Moreover, if the rover experiences a problem, there's a wait to find out what went wrong, followed by another wait as the issue is addressed, Clark told Space.com.

Mars Base Camp would minimize such delays, he said.

"We could be operating rovers on the surface in joystick mode from the Mars Base Camp, as opposed to the way we control rovers today," Clark said. [ Amazing Mars Photos by NASA's Curiosity Rover (Latest Images)]

Exploration tools

Mars Base Camp astronauts could also interact virtually with Mars surface robots, using technology like that developed at Lockheed Martin's Collaborative Human Immersive Laboratory, Jolly said.

Other high-tech tools could aid surface exploration as well, Jolly added. For example, tiny robots carrying small sensors could crawl down into lava tubes, rappel off cliffs or perform other specific tasks, he said.

In addition, Mars Base Camp would fly in a highly elliptical orbit that would allow it to "hover" over particular spots on the Red Planet for long stretches. During that time period, shifts of astronaut-scientists could execute tasks with surface robots and even aerial drones, Jolly said.

Exploration parties

On the Mars orbiting complex, crewmembers would be immersed in a continuous data flood from the rovers, and they'd have the feeling of being front and center on Mars, Clark said.

"They'll have such good imagery, they'll be able to make decisions as they go," while probing a zone of interest, he said. Mars Base Camp astronauts could cover large distances and even reconstruct, via images, areas in great detail, he said.

Clark foresees the use of avatars - electronic "Mars walkers" that are manipulated by a computer user in a virtual space. Those avatars could make up different field-exploration parties that tromp about virtually on the planet, he said.

"Wearing goggles on the Mars Base Camp, researchers can decide where they want to be ... point to another spot ... give the right gesture, and you sort of teleport yourself to another place you want to be," Clark said. "Your body didn't move, but the terrain moved to where you want to stand."

Boots on the ground

Jolly stressed that the Mars Base Camp is not a substitute for getting actual boots on the Red Planet.

"It's a precursor," Jolly said, pointing to other aspects of the Mars Base Camp scenario.

For example, Lockheed Martin has looked into developing a reusable sortie system to get astronauts from Mars Base Camp down to the surface and back to orbit again. A single-stage lander and ascent vehicle would enable two-week missions to Mars, with the ability to abort at any time.

Similarly, human excursions to Mars' two moons, Phobos and Deimos, are being assessed.

Indeed, the Mars Base Camp architecture could support a diversity of missions to low-gravity bodies, Earth's moon, Mars and beyond, Jolly said. The Lockheed Martin plan invites international partners to contribute ideas to this human-rated interplanetary exploration system.

"Now is the time to shape the future," Jolly said.
Leonard David is author of "Mars: Our Future on the Red Planet," published by National Geographic. The book is a companion to the National Geographic Channel series "Mars." A longtime writer for Space.com, David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

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'Mars Base Camp': Lockheed Fleshes Out Red Planet Space Station Plan

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(Image: © Lockheed Martin) THE WOODLANDS, Texas - In 2028, a space station could be circling Mars, if a new concept comes to fruition. As a prelude to human expeditions to the planet's surface, researchers aboard the proposed orbiting lab would aim to answer key questions about the complex world.

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Technicians lift the lander portion of the InSight spacecraft for testing in a clean room facility at Lockheed Martin in Littleton, Colorado.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Lockheed Martin

What lies beneath the surface on Mars? NASA's next Mars mission aims to find out. The InSight project, NASA's first mission to study the Red Planet's deep interior, is on track for a 2018 liftoff after needing to be delayed two years due to a technical issue. Scientists hope that it will help explain the formation of rocky planets, including our own.

InSight is expected to launch sometime in the five weeks following May 8, 2018, with a course charted for its arrival shortly after Thanksgiving. Lockheed Martin Space Systems has constructed the mission's spacecraft - a stationary lander that will be positioned near the Martian equator - and is currently testing it at a facility near Denver.

"The lander is completed and instruments have been integrated onto it so that we can complete the final spacecraft testing including acoustics, instrument deployments and thermal balance tests," Stu Spath, spacecraft program manager at Lockheed Martin, said in a statement.

While many missions have targeted Mars over the past two decades, the rovers, orbiters, and landers involved have all focused on the Red Planet's surface, examining features such as craters, rocks, regolith (soil), and volcanoes.

RELATED: NASA Has Big Plans for AI on Mars and Beyond

Unlike any mission that preceded it, InSight will do a deep dive into the Martian underground, putting two instruments onto the surface that will ferry information back from the Martian depths.

The first is a seismometer whose development was led by the French space agency CNES in collaboration with several other countries, including the US. It is sensitive enough to detect ground movements that are only half the diameter of a hydrogen atom, and its main goal is to record "marsquakes" (seismic waves) or meteor impacts, which will help reveal information about the interior layers of Mars.

The second is a heat probe that can burrow approximately three to five meters (10 to 16 feet) below the surface to measure how much energy comes from the planet's interior.

RELATED: It's Snowing on Mars at Night, Research Suggests

The goal is to better learn how terrestrial planets such as Venus, Earth, and Mars were formed. Mars gives a special advantage to this kind of investigation because, unlike Earth, plate tectonics (which generate earthquakes, among other phenomena) don't appear to be active on the planet.

"Because the interior of Mars has churned much less than Earth's in the past three billion years, Mars likely preserves evidence about rocky planets' infancy better than our home planet does," said Bruce Banerdt, InSight principal investigator at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

The project's third main experimental component will use radio transmissions between Mars and Earth to investigate changes in how Mars rotates on its axis. This could reveal information about the size of the Red Planet's core.

RELATED: The Mars Colony of the Future Could Be Powered by This Advanced Microgrid

When a mission to Mars gets delayed by more than a few weeks, it has to wait another 26 months to launch. That's because the orbits of Earth and Mars bring the two planets into a favorable position to launch spacecraft - when the planets are relatively close to one another, which saves on spacecraft fuel and travel time - only for a few weeks every 26 months.

The InSight mission's 26-month delay came in part due to orbital geometry as well as because of a technical issue. NASA called off the planned March 2016 launch after discovering a leak in a container surrounding the seismometer's main sensors; the container was supposed to maintain a near-vacuum around these sensors. A new vacuum vessel was delivered in July and installed.

"We have fixed the problem we had two years ago, and we are eagerly preparing for launch," said Tom Hoffman, InSight project manager at JPL.

This story was originally published on Seeker.

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NASA's Next Mission to Mars Will Probe the Red Planet's Deep Interior in 2018

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What lies beneath the surface on Mars? NASA's next Mars mission aims to find out. The InSight project, NASA's first mission to study the Red Planet's deep interior, is on track for a 2018 liftoff after needing to be delayed two years due to a technical issue.

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Lockheed Martin has revealed a plan to send humans on a three-year trip around Mars.

At the National Space Club Florida Committee's meeting this week, former NASA space shuttle pilot Tony Antonelli said the concept of a 'Mars base camp' could be achieved as soon as 2028.

According to Antonelli, the firm is not waiting for 'some kind of magic' to reach the goal - instead, the craft would rely on existing technology, putting Orion deep-space capsules on either end of the outpost to carry six astronauts around the red planet.

Scroll down for video

HOW MARS BASE CAMP WILL WORK

The concept is to transport astronauts from Earth to a Mars-orbiting science laboratory.

There, they will perform real-time scientific exploration.

They will also analyse Martian rock and soil samples, and confirm the ideal place to land humans on the surface.

The major components of the architecture will be launched separately.

Some are pre-positioned in Mars orbit ahead of time.

Others are assembled in in space for the journey to Mars.

Six astronauts will launch on Orion, which serves as the heart of the Mars Base Camp interplanetary ship.

'This is all doable in the next 10 to 12 years,' Antonelli said at the meeting, according to Florida Today.

'All that we have to do is decide that we're going to go collectively, together - government, industry, international participation.

'This is a mission for citizens of Earth, and there's a role for everyone to play.'

It comes as NASA continues to investigate a request from Donald Trump's administration to asses the feasibility of sending a crew around the moon with the first flight of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft.

Lockheed Martin first revealed they were joining the space race to Mars back in May, at the 'Humans to Mars' summit in Washington.

The firm said astronauts orbiting the red planet could perform real-time scientific exploration.

They will analyse Martian rock and soil samples, and confirm the ideal place to land humans on the surface.

Nasa wants to get to Mars in the 2030s, and Lockheed Martin hopes to convince the space agency that an orbiting outpost several years earlier is the way forward.

'Nasa has [orbiting Mars] in their plan,' Lockheed Martin's chief technologist for civil space exploration Tony Antonelli told Popular Science at the time.

'And we're colouring in the details...All of these pieces exist today, they're not brand new.

'We're taking advantage of what we've already got.'

Lockheed Martin will use Orion as the mission's command-and-control center, equipped with technologies to help astronauts remotely explore Mars and survive 1,000 days.

Lockheed is also developing space habitats based on Nasa's current designs which would provide both a living space and work space for astronauts.

'Basically, the habitat would be located just far enough away that astronauts couldn't easily turn around and come home when problems arise,' Bill Pratt, Lockeed's program manager for habitat study said on the company's website.

'That really forces us to operate in a different mindset that's more akin to a long trip to Mars.'

The habitat will use solar electric propulsion based on technology already in place on satellites.

TRUMP'S MANNED MOON MISSION

Just last week, NASA's top staff was given instructions to assess the feasibility of sending humans to space with the first flight of the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft.

The mission was originally designed to be uncrewed, and was set to launch in 2018.

In a press conference, officials leading the study revealed the evaluations are now well underway, and they've already created a 'hard, crisp list' of everything that will need to change 'from a hardware standpoint' in order to add crew.

But, so far, the team says they're sticking to their baseline plan for EM-1, and will let the 'let the data drive' any decisions moving forward.

It will see Nasa's Orion, stacked on a Space Launch System rocket capable of lifting 70 metric tons will launch from a newly refurbished Kennedy Space Center in November 2018.

The uncrewed Orion will travel into Distant Retrograde Orbit, breaking the distance record reached by the most remote Apollo spacecraft, and then 30,000 miles farther out (275,000 total miles).

The mission will last 22 days and was originally designed to test system readiness for future crewed operations.

'This advanced propulsion will pre-position key supplies in Mars orbit,' Lockheed Martin writes.

The spacecraft will launch in 2018 without a crew, and this will be followed by a manned mission five years later.

As well as Nasa and Lockheed Martin, the military-led China National Space Administration (CNSA) has their eyes on Mars.

Wu Weiren, Head Designer of CNSA Lunar and Mars Mission told the BBC that CNSA's goal is to reach Mars by 2021

Meanwhile, Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, believes it may be possible to send the first humans to Mars within the next 10 to 15 years.

He believes such a mission may be important to help ensure the long term survival of mankind.

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Lockheed Martin says we could have an orbiting Mars base by 2028

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Lockheed Martin has revealed a plan to send humans on a three-year trip around Mars. At the National Space Club Florida Committee's meeting this week, former NASA space shuttle pilot Tony Antonelli said the concept of a 'Mars base camp' could be achieved as soon as 2028.

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(Image: © Lockheed Martin)

THE WOODLANDS, Texas - In 2028, a space station could be circling Mars, if a new concept comes to fruition. As a prelude to human expeditions to the planet's surface, researchers aboard the proposed orbiting lab would aim to answer key questions about the complex world.

The six-person Mars Base Camp is led by researchers at aerospace giant Lockheed Martin, who unveiled the concept last year and fleshed out more details of the project here at the 48th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC), held March 21-25. The Mars Base Camp is designed to vastly amplify the collection of imagery and scientific data from multiple sites on the planet over a full year of crewed occupation.

This work could help identify the best spots for humans to explore on the Martian surface, Lockheed Martin representatives have said. The station's inhabitants could also use virtual reality, immersive technology and artificial intelligence to drive advanced rovers and other craft on the Red Planet in real time. [ Mars Base Camp: Lockheed Martin Concept Video]

In addition, samples of rock and soil that robots such as NASA's upcoming 2020 Mars rover collect on the Martian surface could be launched to Mars Base Camp, where crewmembers could examine them for signs of Red Planet life, project team members have said.

Real-time operation

Since Lockheed Martin researchers unveiled the project, they have been brainstorming with scientists and engineers from a variety of institutions to refine the idea. Discussions at LPSC continued that work.

"The discussion we're having here at the meeting is, how best can scientific discovery be enabled by having scientists in close proximity to mobile hardware on the surface of Mars or in the Martian atmosphere," Steve Jolly, chief engineer for civil space at Lockheed Martin in Denver, told Space.com.

For example, a human field geologist on Mars would make quick decisions about which spots to explore, the best rock formations to study and where to dig for soil samples, Jolly said. "We want rovers under scientific control to behave in the same way."

That's not possible when Mars rovers and their handlers are on different planets. one to two days the duties that asaid Ben Clark, chief scientist on the Lockheed Martin team studying the Mars Base Camp.

Moreover, if the rover experiences a problem, there's a wait to find out what went wrong, followed by another wait as the issue is addressed, Clark told Space.com.

Mars Base Camp would minimize such delays, he said.

"We could be operating rovers on the surface in joystick mode from the Mars Base Camp, as opposed to the way we control rovers today," Clark said. [ Amazing Mars Photos by NASA's Curiosity Rover (Latest Images)]

Exploration tools

Mars Base Camp astronauts could also interact virtually with Mars surface robots, using technology like that developed at Lockheed Martin's Collaborative Human Immersive Laboratory, Jolly said.

Other high-tech tools could aid surface exploration as well, Jolly added. For example, tiny robots carrying small sensors could crawl down into lava tubes, rappel off cliffs or perform other specific tasks, he said.

In addition, Mars Base Camp would fly in a highly elliptical orbit that would allow it to "hover" over particular spots on the Red Planet for long stretches. During that time period, shifts of astronaut-scientists could execute tasks with surface robots and even aerial drones, Jolly said.

Exploration parties

On the Mars orbiting complex, crewmembers would be immersed in a continuous data flood from the rovers, and they'd have the feeling of being front and center on Mars, Clark said.

"They'll have such good imagery, they'll be able to make decisions as they go," while probing a zone of interest, he said. Mars Base Camp astronauts could cover large distances and even reconstruct, via images, areas in great detail, he said.

Clark foresees the use of avatars - electronic "Mars walkers" that are manipulated by a computer user in a virtual space. Those avatars could make up different field-exploration parties that tromp about virtually on the planet, he said.

"Wearing goggles on the Mars Base Camp, researchers can decide where they want to be ... point to another spot ... give the right gesture, and you sort of teleport yourself to another place you want to be," Clark said. "Your body didn't move, but the terrain moved to where you want to stand."

Boots on the ground

Jolly stressed that the Mars Base Camp is not a substitute for getting actual boots on the Red Planet.

"It's a precursor," Jolly said, pointing to other aspects of the Mars Base Camp scenario.

For example, Lockheed Martin has looked into developing a reusable sortie system to get astronauts from Mars Base Camp down to the surface and back to orbit again. A single-stage lander and ascent vehicle would enable two-week missions to Mars, with the ability to abort at any time.

Similarly, human excursions to Mars' two moons, Phobos and Deimos, are being assessed.

Indeed, the Mars Base Camp architecture could support a diversity of missions to low-gravity bodies, Earth's moon, Mars and beyond, Jolly said. The Lockheed Martin plan invites international partners to contribute ideas to this human-rated interplanetary exploration system.

"Now is the time to shape the future," Jolly said.
Leonard David is author of "Mars: Our Future on the Red Planet," published by National Geographic. The book is a companion to the National Geographic Channel series "Mars." A longtime writer for Space.com, David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

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'Mars Base Camp': Lockheed Fleshes Out Red Planet Space Station Plan

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(Image: © Lockheed Martin) THE WOODLANDS, Texas - In 2028, a space station could be circling Mars, if a new concept comes to fruition. As a prelude to human expeditions to the planet's surface, researchers aboard the proposed orbiting lab would aim to answer key questions about the complex world.

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NASASpaceflight.com has reported that two SpaceX launches have slipped five days, with SES-11 and Iridium NEXT-3 respectively scheduled for launch on October 7th and 9th. Initially planned for October 2nd and 4th, the concurrent delays mean SpaceX will still attempt to conduct two launches within approximately 48 hours of each other.

We expect the Falcon 9 launch with the third set of Iridium NEXT satellites from Vandenberg to be NET Oct. 9. Philip Sloss (NSF) IR-2 photo. pic.twitter.com/rv7FoM5ZbC

- Chris B - NSF (@NASASpaceflight) September 25, 2017

Earlier this summer, SpaceX managed to successfully launch three Falcon 9 missions in just 12 days, with two of those launches and booster recoveries occurring in less than 48 hours. As such, the company has readily demonstrated its ability for rapid-fire launch cadence and a willingness to schedule missions as few as 24 hours apart, if necessary.

While SpaceX is only able to intermittently achieve such a cadence, their ability to launch rapidly will likely mature as LC-40 is reactivated and the company finds itself with three active launch pads. This is the only way SpaceX can achieve a planned cadence of weekly launches by 2019, and it would also help the company conduct several dozen potential launches next year, 28 of which presently have tentative launch dates in 2018.

If all goes according to plan, the second week of October will see two Falcon 9 vehicles launch satellites into Earth orbits and then return to their respective oceans for recovery aboard both of SpaceX's autonomous droneships; Just Read The Instructions in the Pacific, and Of Course I Still Love You in the Atlantic.

Of Course I Still Love You's mythical robotic companion was spotted out and about aboard the droneship earlier this week by Julia Bergeron, an active SpaceX fan and resident of Florida's Space Coast. More exciting still, the launch of SES-11 will be the second time the telecommunications company has chosen to fly on a refurbished Falcon 9, and SpaceX's third commercial reuse of an orbital-class rocket.

I went to @PortCanaveral to visit @SpaceX #OCISLY since it's been a while. I was greeted with autonomous open arms. Yes, we miss you too! pic.twitter.com/9dPDSjpwkd

- Julia (@julia_bergeron) September 22, 2017

SpaceX's next Eastern mission, Koreasat 5A, may be pushed back at least several days from its tentative October 14th launch date due to the aforementioned delays. SES-11 may be the last launch from the LC-39A launch facility for some time, requiring Koreasat 5A to launch from SpaceX's second Eastern pad, LC-40. LC-39A needs a hiatus from launch activities for at least several weeks to give SpaceX's pad engineers time needed to modify the facility for Falcon Heavy. Extensive on-pad testing for Falcon Heavy will precede its inaugural launch attempts, and that process will demand a level of flexibility that an operational launch facility simply could not support over a period of several weeks or months.

Still, SpaceX is unlikely to allow Falcon Heavy to seriously intervene with or delay its customers' launches, and evidence of LC-40 nearing launch readiness is currently hard to find. SpaceX employees are reportedly busy assembling and outfitting the Transporter/Erector/Launcher (TEL) that will allow for launches to begin again at the newly repaired pad, but a significant amount of work remains. If LC-40 ends up requiring more time to reach operational status, LC-39A will undoubtedly continue to support commercial launches until it can be seamlessly replaced. A slower reactivation of LC-40 will also inevitably result in delays of some sort to Falcon Heavy's inaugural launch date, pushing the massive rocket's first liftoff well into December 2017 or the first few months of 2018.
Interested in solar? Get a solar cost estimate and find out how much a solar system would cost for your home or business.

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SpaceX aims for two launches in two days, droneship robot spotted again

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NASASpaceflight.com has reported that two SpaceX launches have slipped five days, with SES-11 and Iridium NEXT-3 respectively scheduled for launch on October 7th and 9th. Initially planned for October 2nd and 4th, the concurrent delays mean SpaceX will still attempt to conduct two launches within approximately 48 hours of each other.

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Brooke Rothamer

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From more than 200,000 people who hoped to leave Earth and die on Mars, only 660 remain in the running. They now face a more stringent astronaut selection process. Those who make the final cut earn a seat on the Mars One mission, a one-way trip to the red planet.
How will the astronauts be selected?
The next round involves more filmed interviews and group challenges to see how well people work together. The final selection round will follow the candidates as they cope with living in harsh, remote mocked-up Mars habitats. At the end of the process, Mars One wants six groups of four astronauts to train for the mission.
How will Mars One pay for the mission?
The Dutch not-for-profit organisation is raising money any way it can. That means broadcasting rights, sponsorship deals, crowd-funding, donations from philanthropists, and licensing intellectual property rights from inventions made along the way. The first mission, costing $6bn (£4bn), aims to send a spacecraft carrying two men and two women to the planet.
What do they need to do?
It's all quite complicated. The first humans are not scheduled to blast off for Mars until 2024. But plenty of missions are planned beforehand to do vital groundwork. In 2018, a lander would be sent to the planet as a trial-run for technologies that the real mission will need. That will be accompanied by a communications satellite to beam messages back and forth. In 2020, an "intelligent" rover is sent to Mars, along with a trailer. The rover's job is to scope out a good landing site, far enough north for the soil to contain a good amount of water, but equatorial enough to get plenty of sunlight. Two years after that, in 2022, six cargo missions head off for Mars. They include another rover, two living units and two life support units. These land near the first rover, which tows them into position and sets up solar panels to power the units. The life support unit is meant to produce a breathable atmosphere in the habitat, 3,000 litres of water, and 120kg of oxygen kept in storage.

Mars One chief executive, Bas Lansdorp, left, announces the launch of astronaut selection for a Mars space mission project, in New York. Mars One is a non-profit organisation that aims to establish a permanent human settlement on Mars. Photograph: Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images

How will the astronauts get to Mars?
Mars One will contract a rocket manufacturer to build them a rocket. That could be Lockheed Martin, SpaceX, or another company. In 2024, they will blast the crew's landing module and their main living quarters for the voyage into Earth's orbit and dock them together. The crew then launch into Earth orbit themselves, climb into the waiting Mars spacecraft, and head off for their destination.
How do they land?
The Mars lander module detaches from the spacecraft and descends to the surface. Once down, the crew in their Mars suits are picked up by one of the rovers and taken to the habitat. It will take them a good while to acclimatise to the gravity on Mars. Their first tasks are to deploy more solar panels, and start their efforts to grow food on Mars.
When do they get fresh company?
The second Mars One crew is planned for take off in 2026, for arrival the following year. Their own habitats and life-support units are meant to land within weeks of the first crew arriving. To protect the astronauts from the harsh radiation on Mars, the rovers will pile Martian soil on top of the habitats.

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Mars One mission: a one-way trip to the red planet in 2024

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From more than 200,000 people who hoped to leave Earth and die on Mars, only 660 remain in the running. They now face a more stringent astronaut selection process. Those who make the final cut earn a seat on the Mars One mission, a one-way trip to the red planet.

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The Nasa-led program will see the two space agencies build a lunar satellite much like the International Space Station (ISS) that can home astronauts and will orbit the moon.

Dubbed the Deep Space Gateway, the station will allow astronauts to study the moon in close detail and will also be used a pit-stop for astronauts travelling farther out into the solar system, particularly Mars.

The agreement between Nasa and the Russian space agency Roscosmos was signed at a space congress in Adelaide, and the US group said the crewed lunar orbiter will act as a "gateway to deep space and the lunar surface."

Roscosmos said in a statement: "The partners intend to develop international technical standards which will be used later, in particular to create a space station in lunar orbit.

"Roscosmos and Nasa have already agreed on standards for a docking unit of the future station.

"Taking into account the country's extensive experience in developing docking units, the station's future elements will be created using Russian designs."

Igor Komarov, Roscosmos's general director, said: "To avoid future problems over technical cooperation, part of the standards should be unified - for a possibility for various countries to work on their craft and dock to the international lunar station."

Construction is set to begin on the project in 2022, with the first modules of the Deep Space Gateway envisioned to be completed two years later.

The craft itself would be powered by Nasa's newly created Solar Electric Propulsion (SEP) - technology which garners power from the sun to drive the spacecraft.

When outlining their vision back in March of this year, Nasa said: "Nasa is leading the next steps into deep space near the moon, where astronauts will build and begin testing the systems needed for challenging missions to deep space destinations including Mars.

"The area of space near the moon offers a true deep space environment to gain experience for human missions that push farther into the solar system, access the lunar surface for robotic missions but with the ability to return to Earth if needed in days rather than weeks or months."

"The gateway and transport could potentially support mission after mission as a hub of activity in deep space near the moon, representing multiple countries and agencies with partners from both government and private industry."

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Nasa and Russia team up for MANNED lunar satellite to act as human gateway to Mars

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The Nasa-led program will see the two space agencies build a lunar satellite much like the International Space Station (ISS) that can home astronauts and will orbit the moon. Dubbed the Deep Space Gateway, the station will allow astronauts to study the moon in close detail and will also be used a pit-stop for astronauts travelling farther out into the solar system, particularly Mars.

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This article outlines all of the problems with mars colonization like the massive cost and the complexity of city planning. The article also states that we could do it but it would take a huge technological leap to do so.

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(Image: © 20th Century Fox)

Paul Sutter is a research fellow at the Astronomical Observatory of Trieste and visiting scholar at the Ohio State University's Center for Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics (CCAPP). Sutter is also host of the podcasts Ask a Spaceman and RealSpace, and the YouTube series Space In Your Face. He contributed this article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Ah, Mars. The place that dreams are made of. As long as those dreams involve a poisonous, tenuous atmosphere, inhospitable cold and lots and lots of red. Still, people seem to want to go there. But will we ever make it?

"Yes," if you ask Elon Musk. I agree, but it probably won't be as easy as you might think, even if you think it's going to be really really hard.

Gravity doesn't know when to give up

(Image: © Space.com Store)

What's the problem? Pick up the nearest object and throw it. I don't care if there are people around you. Do it. This is an experiment. This is science. Note how far the object goes before it hits the ground. Now pick it up and throw it harder. It went further, didn't it?

Part of the reason you didn't throw it as far as your ego thought you would was air resistance. Plowing through the atmosphere like a bull in a molecular china shop, the object quickly loses speed. But the actual "hitting the ground" part is due to gravity. If you took away all the air, your thrown object would still eventually hit the ground.

In an airless world, no matter how hard you throw the object, it will reach the ground in the same amount of time. That's because gravity only works in the "down" direction, not the "over" direction, so for all gravity cares, you might as well have just lazily dropped it. But the harder you throw it, the more speed it will have, and the farther it will go before inevitably hitting the ground.

Or maybe not so inevitably. Imagine throwing something so hard that in the few seconds before it hits the ground, it reached the other side of a house. Or maybe a street. Throw it harder and you could get it across town. Across the country. Even faster: across an ocean.

Imagine throwing it so fast that by the time gravity gets around to doing its thing, the Earth has curved away from it. Gravity keeps on tugging at the object, but it frustratingly keeps missing the ground.

Ta-da: orbit!

How fast is orbital fast? Around 18,000 miles per hour (or 11 kilometers per second), give or take. There is, after all, an actual atmosphere to deal with.

You can certainly go slower and still visit space. Just make sure you packed a heat shield, because you're coming back down. You can also go even faster than orbital speed and escape the jealous clutches of Earth's gravity altogether, which is what it takes to get to Mars.

Getting away from it all

And that's the fundamental challenge. There just aren't many ways of pushing stuff that fast. Our best method so far involves blowing up stuff in a tube, and making sure to leave a hole in one side. Newton's laws do the rest. It seems primitive, but the engineers tell me these "rockets" are actually quite complicated.

We can easily send robots to Mars, because their feelings don't get hurt if you forget to pack the oxygen and food. But people are a different ... well, animal, altogether. Humans are heavy. Humans need to carry little bubbles of the Earth ecosystem with them everywhere they go. Humans need room to stretch. Humans want to bring human-centric niceties, like hammers and toothpaste and lima beans.

Oh, yeah, and we need to bring them back home, I suppose. So pack the spare rockets and extra fuel.

Let this sink in: at the time of this writing, we don't have the capacity to send humans beyond Low Earth Orbit, the very edge of space, let alone Mars. Getting to Mars is hard, folks, and it requires a lot of new technology.

And that's just enough stuff for a handful of hominids to poke around the place for a bit. A colony? Look around the city you're in, and marvel at all the junk it takes to get you through the day. Think of all the layers of civilization and organization (spontaneous or otherwise) it takes to get you dinner. Made of food. Cooked. On a plate. That you will clean up with water ... eventually. In a house. On a street. And on and on.

A city is a massively complicated thing. Sure, we've built them from the ground up before, but colonies on Earth have a few advantages, namely, a) breathable air, b) liquid water, c) dirt and d) proximity to other Earth-based cities. Even the U.S. National Science Foundation's Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station - the closest to a Mars colony you can get while keeping two feet on the Earth - enjoys most of these advantages, and is still a nightmare to keep alive.

Don't get zapped

And did I mention the cosmic rays? No? Well, now's a good time - cosmic rays are high-energy protons (and some heavier nuclei) zipping through the universe, generated in...well, we're not exactly sure, but probably supernovae and other cataclysmic events. The universe is swimming in them, and they cut through DNA like a hot knife through butter. The butter is you in this metaphor, just to be clear. On Earth the atmosphere makes for nice insulation, catching most of the deadliest cosmic rays, but some still make it through, possibly giving everyone - especially airline crews - a slightly elevated risk of cancer. [ Radiation Fears Shouldn't Hold Back Mars Colonization (Op-Ed )]

But a two-year journey to Mars? Exposure on the surface? Better make sure your transports and habitats are well-shielded or buried underground - or at least make sure you have some talented oncologists on staff.

Despite these challenges and more, it's not impossible to get people to Mars and start a viable colony. It's not like there's any physics-based reason preventing the escapades. It's just a question of engineering. And money.

Lots and lots of money.

The high cost of Martian real estate

SpaceX has an ambitious plan to get a colony on Mars through private investment in ever-larger, cheap, reusable rockets that could deliver a steady stream of people and supplies to slowly build up a colony over decades. It just takes lots of money.

NASA has an ambitious plan to build the Space Launch System, the biggest, most hard-core rocket ever made. With that kind of fire, you could send all sorts of stuff into space, including a crew to Mars. It just takes lots of money.

There are other ideas, such as Mars One ("I know, just leave everybody there, then we don't have to pay for a return ticket!") and Mars Direct, but in the end it takes time. And lots of money.

So eventually, we'll do it. Humans will go to Mars . Babies will be born there. Civilization will flourish - or flounder - on the Red Planet. It's just a matter of when, and of how much money we're willing to spend. Did I mention the money part?

Sure, if one day everyone decided that we don't need socks anymore, we could use the leftover savings to fast-track a Martian colony. Full of chaffed feet, but a colony nonetheless. We're certainly at the civilizational stage where sending humans to Mars is feasible, which is a huge first step. A hundred years ago, not only did we lack the technology, but also the economic wherewithal to entertain such a wacky notion.

That's the trick to getting to Mars: either we need to be so wealthy as a society that a trip is so economically insignificant that nobody cares, or there needs to be a large political (if led by NASA) or economic (if led by a company) incentive to do it. One or both of those scenarios is bound to happen, sooner or later.

Hopefully sooner.

Learn more by listening to the episode "Will we colonize Mars?" on the Ask A Spaceman podcast, available on iTunes and on the Web at http://www.askaspaceman.com. Thanks to Ann Fisher for the question that led to this episode! Ask your own question on Twitter using #AskASpaceman or by following Paul @PaulMattSutter and facebook.com/PaulMattSutter.
Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates - and become part of the discussion - on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Space.com.

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(Image: © 20th Century Fox) Paul Sutter is a research fellow at the Astronomical Observatory of Trieste and visiting scholar at the Ohio State University's Center for Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics (CCAPP). Sutter is also host of the podcasts Ask a Spaceman and RealSpace, and the YouTube series Space In Your Face.

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This article talks about how Elon Musk wants to beat NASA to Mars. He has business satellites that would raise approximately $30 billion in revenue. He has also had two major scientific breakthroughs.

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Regardless of any offhand comments President Trump may have made suggesting his administration wants NASA to fast-track a manned mission to Mars - "We want to try and do that during my first term or, at worst, during my second term," he said during a conversation with astronauts last month - technological and fiscal realities suggest that NASA won't be fielding such a mission any time in the foreseeable future.

But if SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has his way, SpaceX could conceivably launch a robotic mission to Mars in 2020 followed by a crewed mission as soon as 2024, before a theoretical second Trump term expires. And that is much sooner than NASA's goal of sending humans to Mars by the 2030s.

Susana Gonzalez | Bloomberg | Getty Images

While experts agree that such an ambitious mission in such a short timeframe is unlikely, Musk and SpaceX have defied consensus before. Given the somewhat unlikely rapport that's developed between the Tesla and SpaceX founder and President Trump - Musk made two trips to Trump Tower preinauguration, where both Mars and public-private partnerships were reportedly discussed - the idea that SpaceX might be the first to put human footprints on Mars seems less remote than it did a year ago.

So why is Elon Musk so eager to colonize the Red Planet? After all, at 95 percent carbon dioxide, its atmosphere is inhospitable to life, and its harsh climate nearly uninhabitable for humans. Getting there is also a dangerous months-long spaceflight gambit. Nonetheless, Musk has said it's essential to become an interplanetary species lest humans face eventual extinction on Earth, and he believes his company can lead the way off our planet.

Musk's ultimate vision is a Martian city of thousands if not millions of people - one that will require thousands of round-trips and 40 to 100 years to realize. But he's determined to make this vision a reality, first by sending a Dragon 2 capsule to Mars in 2020 - to test out landing procedures, scout locations for future landings and try out technologies needed to land larger, heavier equipment on the Martian surface - and then again every 27 months as SpaceX transports tons of equipment to the Martian surface.

But this vision also presents a unique set of challenges. Before SpaceX can land its first manned mission on the Red Planet, engineers need to develop the company's planned Interplanetary Transport System, a two-part vehicle combining the most powerful rocket ever built, and a massive spacecraft designed to carry at least 100 people to Mars per flight.

After hauling the spaceship into Earth orbit, the ITS rocket will return to Earth, where it or another rocket will then carry a fuel tanker into orbit to rendezvous with and fuel up the orbiting spaceship (which will initially launch with very little fuel on board so it can carry more people and cargo).

Once fueled, the spaceship will light its own thrusters - nine of the Raptor engines SpaceX successfully test-fired for the first time in September - and blast off toward Mars. Musk expects the ITS spaceship to make the trip in just 80 days, far shy of the six to nine months it currently takes spacecraft to travel to Mars.

After making a retro-rocket-assisted soft landing on the Martian surface, this crew would begin constructing habitats and a propellant plant that would allow for the refueling of spacecraft to launch back to Earth, closing the transportation loop and allowing for regular transit to and from the Martian surface aboard the reusable spacecraft.

That's the larger idea, anyhow - one that will require SpaceX to make huge strides in propulsion, life support, rocket design, retro-propulsion (for landing) and other technologies. Regardless of those myriad challenges, Musk continues to talk of sending at least a first, exploratory crewed mission to Mars within the next decade.

"People can smirk," says Marco Caceres, senior analyst and director of space studies at aerospace consultancy Teal Group. "But it's hard to argue with one success after another."

Funding a Mars mission

All this will take money, and that's where SpaceX's commercial space business comes in. The company's mission backlog contains roughly 70 missions that have yet to launch worth some $10 billion. Though SpaceX's finances aren't publicly available, a handful of internal documents obtained by the Wall Street Journal earlier this year showed that the company, though profitable, has been operating with razor-thin margins in an effort to keep costs down.

But that backlog and revenue potential could soon change as the company settles into a faster launch tempo, breaks into new markets, and expands its revenue streams. For instance, starting next year, SpaceX plans to begin deploying a constellation of nearly 4,500 satellites that will blanket the world in Internet connectivity, a business the company reportedly believes will bring in $30 billion in revenue by 2025.

Meantime, given its ability to consistently undercut its launch industry rivals on price (the current list price for a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is $62 million, roughly half what the competition often charges), SpaceX's dominant position within the commercial-and now military-launch markets is relatively secure for the time being.

SpaceX's string of recent successes hasn't come without adversity, however. In September of last year, one of its Falcon 9 rockets exploded on the launchpad during pre-flight fueling, incinerating a costly satellite payload along with the launch vehicle. The accident grounded SpaceX's fleet for several months while engineers sought to isolate the cause, marking the second time the company has had to suspend launches after an accident.

Despite that setback, SpaceX has managed to thrive over the past 12 months. It has launched six successful missions since returning to flight in January. With a seventh launch slated for June 1, the company is on pace to launch more than a dozen missions this year-potentially quite a few more than the one-per-month it was averaging in 2016.

It has also brought more than 10 of its first stage boosters safely back to Earth after launch, normalizing a feat that seemed insurmountably difficult just a few years ago. It has successfully refurbished and reused one of those boosters on a second mission, a development that could drastically impact the economics of space launch going forward. And it has successfully broken into the lucrative military launch market, sending its first classified payload for the U.S. Air Force skyward earlier this month.

Key breakthroughs

The latter two developments are particularly relevant to SpaceX's future ambitions for one simple reason: spaceflight is expensive. By breaking into the military satellite space-the one segment of the satellite launch market SpaceX had yet to disrupt-the company has a new $1.9 billion market from which it can draw revenue.

Reusability on the other hand could drastically reduce the costs associated with each launch, allowing SpaceX to improve its margins while cutting its prices further. "The degree to which they have visibly demonstrated return and reuse, that's quite significant," Carissa Christensen, CEO of aerospace consultancy Bryce Space and Technology, says. "That's been a long-targeted industry objective, and SpaceX is the first to do it commercially."

The second payload to ride atop a recovered and refurbished rocket booster will launch next month, and the company could begin seeing significant cost reductions as a result of its reusable rocket technology within two or three years.

"I think SpaceX arguably is positioning itself to be the partner of choice for any federally funded or internationally-backed Mars mission." -Carissa Christensen, CEO of Bryce Space and Technology

"If you can recover those engines and they're fine, you can save an awful lot of money," Caceres says. "By the time you get to maybe 10 of these kinds of missions, it becomes routine. You start to realize some cost savings, which allows you to start noticeably dropping the price of your missions. And if you can get the price down to 30 or 35 million [dollars] per mission, nobody else can come close to that."

A trillion-dollar budget

What does all this have to do with sending astronauts to Mars? For one, such an interplanetary mission will be extremely expensive, likely measured in trillions rather than hundreds of billions of dollars, Caceres says. One way to enable such a mission is to reduce the cost of space access, spurring economic activity in orbit and beyond which in turn will help create economies of scale that drive costs down further, a point to which Musk has spoken at length.

SpaceX has already succeeded in this regard, cutting the average cost of launch in half with its $62 million Falcon 9 rocket and forcing others in the industry like United Launch Alliance to slash their own prices while also investing in newer, less-expensive launch technologies. If savings from its reusable rocket technology begin to manifest themselves as expected, Caceres says, "theoretically SpaceX could be launching dozens of times per year and at prices maybe one-fourth their competitors'."

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While continuing to drive down cost, SpaceX can also work toward its Mars ambitions by honing technologies and capabilities that position the company to assume a larger workload with its partners in government. In the near-term, two such technologies/capabilities to watch are the company's test of its far more powerful Falcon Heavy rocket later this year and its first crewed missions to the International Space Station aboard its Dragon crew capsule, likely beginning in 2018.

If SpaceX can successfully demonstrate both of those capabilities, Caceres predicts that NASA will come under Congressional pressure to explain why it needs to continue pouring money into the $18 billion Space Launch System, NASA's own super heavy-lift rocket and space capsule. If Congress decides NASA doesn't need to keep funding the Space Launch System, SpaceX would arguably be the best-positioned commercial company to step into its place, making it the de facto launch partner for any federally-funded future Mars mission.

"The name of the game these days is public-private partnerships, because it's clear now that unless Congress dramatically increases NASA's annual budget of just under $19 billion a year, NASA cannot come close to doing the things that it would like to do or that Congress would like it to do," Caceres says. "So you need to find a way to partner with companies that have the technology, the ambition, and the vision, and the only company like that out there frankly is SpaceX."

"I think SpaceX arguably is positioning itself to be the partner of choice for any federally funded or internationally-backed Mars mission," Bryce Space and Technology's Christensen says.

That could change as competitors like United Launch Alliance and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin bring new rockets and new competition into the commercial launch market at the end of the decade. But with an enviable head start, rapidly growing market share, and an increasingly lucrative launch services business bankrolling SpaceX's ambitions-not to mention a President with a penchant for the grandiose in the White House-Musk's optimism surrounding a future manned Mars mission seems less extreme than it did last year.

While it may happen during Trump's presidency, there's no indication that Musk and company will stop pushing for it-potentially dragging NASA and the U.S. government along with them if necessary, Caceres says.

"There doesn't seem to be anything they're not willing to tackle when it comes to space," he says. "They're not just going to sit back and get a bunch of contracts. That's too boring for Elon Musk."
-By Clay Dillow, special to CNBC.com

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Elon Musk is rushing to beat NASA to Mars, perhaps during Trump presidency

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Regardless of any offhand comments President Trump may have made suggesting his administration wants NASA to fast-track a manned mission to Mars - "We want to try and do that during my first term or, at worst, during my second term," he said during a conversation with astronauts last month - technological and fiscal realities suggest that NASA won't be fielding such a mission any time in the foreseeable future.

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This online article talks about the SpaceX program and getting to Mars by 2024. It also talks about how they have plans to land on the planet, inhabit and live on the planet, grow food and crops on this planet, and the time it will take to achieve all of this.

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When you think of astronauts on Mars, what comes to mind? Did you picture a red planet turning green with time and continued human colonization? Unfortunately, those days are far in the future, if they even happen at all. During the interview, Davis explained, "Terraforming has a connotation of humans making another planetary body, like Mars, Earth-like. But really, it's about humans changing their environment to make it more supportive of our need." What does this mean?

The first few trips to Mars will only include the essentials. One of NASA's first goals for its astronauts is to learn how to live on the planet. Since it differs greatly from Earth, survival is an important skill for astronauts to master. "The initial base will probably include a habitat and a science lab. [The inside of] these modules will be much like the space station, but there will be differences." One example Davis gave included preventing toxic dust from getting into the habitat and lab. Microbial life is another threat to astronauts. Without more research on the planet, NASA can't say for certain what dangers could threaten human life. With this in mind, all scientists involved with the Mars mission will take these and other potential risks under consideration.

After the NASA base is well established and the astronauts learned survival basics, things get more interesting. "Eventually, since it costs so much to send things from Earth, we will want to farm on Mars. Such a farm will really be green houses to protect the plants against the challenging Martian environment," said Davis. Keep in mind the Martian soil isn't like the soil on Earth. It lacks organics "[the] rotting biological materials that plants need." Fortunately, it contains the minerals they require. Davis said that his team calls this soil regolith and it will need to be cleansed of some toxic materials. And NASA scientists can get the job done.

Detoxified soil isn't the only thing astronauts will need to grow plants. They'll also need to utilize the water from Mar's ice-capped poles. Davis said, "Many anticipate that the first human base will be located adjacent to these billion-year-old ice deposits, so that humans can easily produce the volumes of water that they will need to support water intensive activities like farming." As of yet there is no word about which pole will be more beneficial, if there's a difference at all.

Before speaking to Davis, I believed that future Martian farms would be equivalent to greenhouses here on Earth. It seemed logical. That's how people control plant growth here. However, while the plants will need a higher pressure to grow, the plants "[don't] have to be [at] an Earth-like pressure. In fact, we can pressurize the greenhouse with carbon dioxide, which is the main component of the Martian atmosphere." This sounds like a win-win for both the scientists and the plants. Instead of the astronauts having to wear cumbersome space suits, they could "just wear lightweight oxygen masks" in the greenhouses. The key takeaway is that the planet doesn't have to transform into Earth2.0. Maybe one day it will, but for the time being, it just has to function for NASA scientists to live and work.
Time Will Tell
Mars has captured the imagination of humans for decades. These plans are just the next step in the process of getting the Mars Mission from the 'drawing room floor' to a funded mission with a launch date. NASA isn't the only ones with their eyes on Mars. Others are already coming up with their own plans for the red planet. Scientists and enthusiasts have speculated on everything from nuking the planet into habitability to creating a magnetic shield around the planet to encourage it to 'grow' its own atmosphere.

Mars is hopefully just our first step into the universe. Once we've dipped our toes out into the solar system, it will be easier to expand out into the asteroid belt and beyond. Mars' low gravity provides the perfect platform for constructing and launching other deep space vehicles. After we've got that foothold, the only thing holding us back is our technology. As it is technology is the Achilles heel of the mission now. We might have a way to get to Mars before we have a means of safe exploration.

Those of us who have grown up watching the Apollo missions, space shuttles take-off and now the Falcon rockets climbing through the atmosphere likely won't see Mars colonized in our lifetimes, but that doesn't negate the wonder we all feel every time one of those rockets soars into the sky. It's not just a rocket, but a source of inspiration for generations to come - one of which will step foot on Martian soil.
Megan Ray Nichols is a freelance science writer and the editor of Schooled By Science. When she isn't writing, Megan enjoys hiking, swimming and going to the movies. She invites you to follow her on and subscribe to her blog .

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If we successfully land on Mars, could we live there?

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When you think of astronauts on Mars, what comes to mind? Did you picture a red planet turning green with time and continued human colonization? Unfortunately, those days are far in the future, if they even happen at all. During the interview, Davis explained, "Terraforming has a connotation of humans making another planetary body, like Mars, Earth-like.

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Mars One claims that their plan is more feasible than other competitors' because theirs does not include a need for a means of returning to Earth.

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Mission Feasibility - Mission - Mars One

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The Mars One crews consist of people that want to settle on Mars. Absence of a return mission reduces the mission infrastructure radically. No return vehicle, return propellant or the systems to produce the propellant locally are required. Permanent settlement also reduces the required technology development; vehicles that can take off from Mars and return to Earth are currently unavailable and untested.

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This article takes a more realistic approach by outlining all the obstacles NASA will have to tackle still to get humans to Mars by 2020. It talks a lot about the benefit of having the President's support for NASA's missions.

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Today, during a phone call with astronaut Peggy Whitson on the International Space Station, President Trump joked that he hoped NASA would land astronauts on Mars by the end of his first term in 2020.

Obviously, this timeline is completely unreasonable for an agency that's already running behind on its plan to get to Mars by the 2030s. Getting to Mars is going to be incredibly difficult, with a lot of moving pieces that all need to fit together seamlessly.

Here's a to-do list of just some of the things NASA would need to get done by 2020:

1. Finish rocket. NASA's extremely powerful Space Launch System won't fly until late 2018 or early 2019. That wouldn't provide a lot of time for test flights before we'd use it to hurtle astronauts on their very long and hypothetical journey to the red planet in 2020.

2. Make sure no one's gonna die. The ride to Mars is probably going take six- to nine-months. That's a lot of time for a human body to suffer though weightlessness, which destroys our bones, and deep space radiation, which causes cancer and messes with our brains and possibly our hearts. Not to mention the risks of going bonkers from boredom.

3. Build space RV. Speaking of going bonkers, can you imagine spending several months crammed into this tiny spacecraft with your fellow astronauts? No, because the Orion capsule is meant for short trips. For longer trips-like, Journey to Mars long-astronauts are going to need a bigger habitat with radiation protection, life support systems, water recycling, food storage, and a working bathroom. NASA hasn't yet selected a design for the habitat, let alone started building one.

4. Feed astronauts. Vicky Kloeris, who feeds the astronauts on the International Space Station, told us that it's not so easy to design food for Mars. There's evidence that deep space radiation will degrade the food, making it not only yucky but also less nutritious.

5. Develop faster comms. Depending on how the planets line up, it can take a signal up to 24 minutes to travel between Earth and Mars. That's simply too long to wait if you've got astronauts awaiting instructions or dealing with an emergency.

6. Realign stars. Earth and Mars revolve around the sun at different speeds, so sometimes Mars is closer or farther from us depending on how the planets align. NASA likes to launch missions around the time that Mars is closest to us. Those dates are coming up in July 2018 and October 2020. So if we want to get to Mars before the next presidential election, we'd best be packed and ready to go by the middle of next year. No problem!

7. Figure out escape plan. The president didn't say anything about bringing our Mars explorers home afterwards, but if we want our astronauts to return, we'll have to send a getaway vehicle that can carry them from the surface of Mars back to their deep space RV. This would probably be a specially designed Mars Ascent Vehicle with a full fuel tank. We don't have a design for it yet, but no big deal-designing rockets is totally cheap and easy and fast.

8. Win lottery. Getting to Mars is going to be tough even if we take it slow. NASA's plan is to invest a few billion dollars per year over the next few decades. But according to some estimates, the journey to Mars could cost up to $2 trillion. Compare that to NASA's annual budget, which is about $19 billion dollars. And, quite frankly, all the money in the world wouldn't be able to buy them enough time to complete the research that's needed to make sure our astronauts get there in one piece by 2020.

The journey to Mars could be one of humankind's greatest achievements. Or, if done poorly, it could be one of American spaceflight's grandest tragedies. It's important to set realistic expectations about the danger and difficulty of this mission.

NASA, for its part, just seems happy get some support from the new president.

"NASA is gratified to have such strong support and enthusiasm from President Trump," NASA Public Affairs Officer Jim Wilson told Popular Science. "We look forward to continuing to work closely with the President and Congress on achieving our human exploration goals."

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What it would actually take to get to Mars by 2020

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Today, during a phone call with astronaut Peggy Whitson on the International Space Station, President Trump joked that he hoped NASA would land astronauts on Mars by the end of his first term in 2020. Obviously, this timeline is completely unreasonable for an agency that's already running behind on its plan to get to Mars by the 2030s.

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In order to colonize Mars, we would need a reliable source of water. This article talks about the feasibility of using underground ice deposits on Mars and other sources (moon and asteroids).

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As humans spread out across the Earth, the locations of new colonies were driven by the accessibility of resources: not only food and water, but also arable land, forests, and minerals.

Access to such resources remains important as the economy moves into space. Here, water has emerged as the pre-eminent resource to exploit first.

The question then becomes, from where will we extract the water? Along with the Moon and near Earth asteroids as potential sources, Mars is an important candidate.

Eyes on Mars

Mars is the focus for human settlement in space, largely due to Elon Musk's Space X, Mars One, and NASA's activities in this regard.

The NASA human landing site selection committee proposed 47 potential sites for a human occupied base on Mars. They considered not only scientific regions of interest but also "resource regions of interest" - where there is accessible water.

A number of conditions need to be met for an exploration zone to be considered useful for prospecting for water. Water needs to be accessible, located near the surface, and of sufficient size and concentration to meet the user needs.

For operational reasons the Mars water site also needs to be located with a latitude less than 50°. This ruled out the previously identified large surface ice deposits in the high latitude polar regions of Mars.

Buried Ice

The Protonilus-Deuteronilus Mensae region on Mars is located in the northern mid-latitudes of Mars (~8°E and 60°E 38N and 50°N).

This region is host to numerous land forms which appear to contain large buried ice deposits, hundreds of meters thick and several kilometers wide.

If the ice is preserved as we believe, these features would represent a significant resource easily capable of satisfying the requirements for a human base. It is for this reason that three exploration zones have been proposed in the region.

At the low pressures in the Martian atmosphere, and the temperatures in equatorial regions, ice can "sublime" directly from the solid to gas state (evaporation being the transition from water to gas). The features we are observing protect ice under a layer of debris.

Because of this, it is not possible to evaluate directly the quantity of ice present. Instead we must rely on data collected by orbital spacecraft to work out the geological properties and potential water resources available.

If we were able to make measurements on the planet itself (as we can usually do on Earth), things would be much clearer. However, there have been no landed rover missions to this region of Mars, so we are reliant on remotely sensed data.

There is still a lot to be learned from data collected by satellites orbiting Mars. These give us high resolution imagery of the surface, along with insight into the geological properties of these features.

We can make informed assessments about how much water there is, and where it is distributed, as well as about what lies over it (which will have to either be drilled through or excavated to reach the water). These interpretations can be used to guide future exploration activities, and assist equipment design and mine planning operations.

Rover missions could provide more certainty, but planning such a mission will not occur until after site selection, and insight into the feasibility of mining ice deposits on Mars to support human missions to the Red Planet.

Other Mining in Space

It's not only Mars which is being investigated as a potential source of water in space. The Moon with its supply of polar water ice is being considered as a potential resource to supply proposed lunar bases or propellant for Mars missions. The Lunar Resource Prospector mission set to launch in the early 2020s will help us better understand the resource potential of the Moon.

Asteroid mining companies such as Deep Space Industries and Planetary Resources are looking to exploit water stored in near Earth asteroids and are working towards exploratory missions in the near future.

There are a large number of technical issues that must be navigated before such an ambitious mining enterprise is considered low-risk enough to be feasible. These are challenging, but not insurmountable. A significant international effort is afoot to solve the problems with several companies, the major space agencies, and the government of Luxembourg committed to the task.

Representatives from these stakeholder groups will be in Australia to discuss these issues at the Off-Earth Mining Forum held in Sydney, September 20-21, 2017.

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Ice mined on mars could provide water for humans exploring space

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As humans spread out across the Earth, the locations of new colonies were driven by the accessibility of resources: not only food and water, but also arable land, forests, and minerals. Access to such resources remains important as the economy moves into space. Here, water has emerged as the pre-eminent resource to exploit first.

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This article highlights the main issues that will need to be overcome in order to get to Mars, as well as problems that will need to be dealt with once living on Mars.

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While humans have dreamed about going to Mars practically since it was discovered, an actual mission in the foreseeable future is finally starting to feel like a real possibility.

But how real is it?

Nasa says it's serious about one day doing a manned mission while private companies are jockeying to present ever-more audacious plans to get there. And equally important, public enthusiasm for the Red Planet is riding high after the Curiosity rover's spectacular landing and photo-rich mission.

Earlier this month, scientists, Nasa officials, private space company representatives and other members of the spaceflight community gathered in Washington D.C. for three days to discuss all the challenges at the Humans to Mars (H2M) conference, hosted by the spaceflight advocacy group Explore Mars, which has called for a mission that would send astronauts in the 2030s.

But the Martian dust devil is in the details, and there is still one big problem: We currently lack the technology to get people to Mars and back. An interplanetary mission of that scale would likely be one of the most expensive and difficult engineering challenges of the 21st century. "Mars is pretty far away," Nasa's director of the International Space Station, Sam Scimemi said during the H2M conference. "It's six orders of magnitude further than the space station. We would need to develop new ways to live away from the Earth and that's never been done before. Ever."

There are some pretty serious gaps in our abilities, including the fact that we can't properly store the necessary fuel long enough for a Mars trip, we don't yet have a vehicle capable of landing people on the Martian surface, and we aren't entirely sure what it will take to keep them alive once there. A large part of the H2M summit involved panelists discussing the various obstacles to a manned Mars mission. "I've said repeatedly I'll know when we're serious about sending humans to the Mars surface when they start making significant technology investments in particular areas," engineer Bobby Braun, former Nasa chief technologist, told Wired.com.

The good news is that there's nothing technologically impossible about a manned Mars mission. It's just a matter of deciding it's a priority and putting the time and money into developing the necessary tools. Right now Nasa, other space agencies, and private companies are working to bring Mars in reach.

Here, Wired.com presents the most challenging obstacles we'll have to overcome to get to Mars and how to fix them.
Getting off the Earth
Before you can run you need to walk. And before you can do deep space exploration, you need to get off your own planet.

While we've been sending people and probes into space for more than 50 years, a manned Mars mission would be on a much larger scale than almost anything we've done before. There is no rocket in existence that can take off from the Earth's surface and escape its gravitational pull to reach space carrying the weight of a large spacecraft, astronauts and all the supplies and materials needed to get to Mars. Most likely, rockets would have to make several trips to drop off supplies and pieces for a vehicle into low-Earth orbit.

There astronauts would slowly build the vehicle over time and then rocket off to the Red Planet.

That still requires some heavy lifting. The largest construct assembled in space, the International Space Station, has a mass of 4,500 tonnes and required 31 spaceship flights to complete.

According to Nasa, a Mars vehicle capable of taking people to the Red Planet and back would be smaller than the space station -- around 1,250 tonnes. But our capabilities are hampered by the retirement of the Space Shuttle fleet, which was capable of carrying large masses to Earth orbit with relative ease.

Using existing rockets, aerospace engineer Bret Drake, who leads planning and analysis at Nasa's Exploration Missions and Systems Office, estimated it would take 70 or 80 launches to assemble a Mars mission spacecraft. Considering the ISS took more than a decade to complete, assembling a Mars vehicle would require a very long time.

But in the future, this task should be much easier. Nasa is hoping to have its Space Launch System ready by 2017, which will be the largest rocket ever flown, even bigger than the Saturn V that carried astronauts to the moon. The private spaceflight company SpaceX is also working on its new Falcon Heavy launch vehicle, which would have somewhat less cargo capacity than Nasa's big rocket but still much greater than anything around today. Falcon Heavy's first tests could begin later this year.

Nasa estimates it would need to fire at least seven of its new SLS rockets to deliver to orbit the people, supplies, and ships necessary for a Mars mission. And while SLS could help get to the Red Planet, it should be noted that there are other alternatives we could pursue.
Fuel storage
Humans aren't the only things you want to send on a manned Mars mission.

In order to stay alive in space, people need lots of things: food, oxygen, shelter, and, perhaps most importantly, fuel.

Somewhere around 80 percent of the initial mass launched to space for a human Mars mission is going to be propellant. Trouble is, storing that amount of fuel in space is hard.

Objects in low-Earth orbit (the place you'd park your Mars spaceship while you built it) travel around the world every 90 minutes. During half that time, they experience the intense heat of the sun and then the unheated blackness of space. That difference causes liquid hydrogen and oxygen -- rocket fuel -- to vaporise.

Unless tanks are regularly vented, containers holding these materials are liable to explode.

Hydrogen in particular is susceptible to leaking out of its tanks, resulting in a loss of about 4 percent per month. This means that if a Mars mission required a year to assemble in low-Earth orbit, it would lose more than half of its propellant before even departing to the Red Planet. At a cost of around $10,000 (£6,600) to send a kilogram to space, that would be an expensive waste.

Nasa is actively pursuing new technology that would allow them to store propellant in space for long periods of time. Starting this year, the agency hopes to demonstrate the capability for large, in-space cryogenic loading and transfer. Such technology would be extremely valuable for a manned Mars mission and could one day lead to the equivalent of a Space Age gas depots waiting to top up a rocket's fuel.
Advanced propulsion
While you want to get people to Mars as fast as possible to minimise exposure to the hazards of radiation and weightlessness in space, their supplies can leave Earth earlier and travel at a more leisurely pace.

A relatively low-power engine could push along a large ship carrying astronauts' supplies for their time on Mars. In its interplanetary plans, Nasa would like to send such things on ahead of a crew and have them waiting on the Martian surface when the people arrive.

The agency is currently working on advancing solar electric propulsion, which shoots ionised gas behind a craft to move it forward. Previous missions, such as Nasa's Dawn and the Japanese Hayabusa spacecraft, have used this method. A Mars mission would need much larger solar electric thrusters than have been used before. The agency currently has plans for a mission to collect a small asteroid and tug it back to Earth, which could be helpful in moving this technology forward.
Landing on Mars
We currently don't have the capability to land people on Mars, plain and simple. This is a fairly recently recognised problem, having only been understood through calculations made in the early 2000s.

As engineers began to build larger and larger machines to land on the Martian surface, they realised they were reaching a limit. The thin Martian atmosphere can't quickly inflate very large parachutes, such as those that would be needed to slow a spacecraft big enough to carry humans. But the atmosphere is just substantial enough that a lunar-style vehicle using downward-facing rockets couldn't land without creating too much turbulence.

The 0.9 tonne Curiosity rover, which arrived on Mars in 2012, is the largest object our current technology can place on the ground.

Human-scale missions, according to Nasa, will require landing at least 36 tonnes. Even the bare bones one-way manned mission proposed by Mars One would bring around 9 tonnes of material to the surface. "Landing Curiosity was landing a small nuclear car," said engineer Bobby Braun, former Nasa chief technologist and currently a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. For a human-scale mission, "We're talking about landing perhaps a two-story house, and then another two-story house with fuel and supplies right next to it." "That's a fantastic challenge," he added. Though Curiosity's landing was a truly remarkable achievement, it "pales in comparison to what might be required one day to land humans."

Landing things at that scale will require new technologies that have to be invested in, matured, and tested over and over to make sure that they don't kill their crew. "The one thing we do not want landing for humans to be characterised as is ' Seven Minutes of Terror'," said engineer Kendall Brown of Nasa's Marshall Spaceflight Centre.

Curiosity also had a relatively large landing ellipse. That is, researchers could be reasonably sure where the rover would touch down, but only within an ellipse seven by 20 kilometres. Imagine if a human descent vehicle touched down on Mars and then the astronauts' supplies came down 20 km away. It would be quite a schlep just to go pick up your extra oxygen.

The next generation of landers will need accuracy on the order of hundreds of metres and make sure they don't come down on top of some other vital piece of equipment, like a nuclear power plant.

Scientists at Nasa are currently working on hypersonic inflatable systems. These are basically gigantic balloon-like objects that would expand and stiffen to become something like a super-rigid parachute, helping to slow a landing vehicle down. But the key technology to landing people on Mars is something called supersonic retropropulsion.

A spacecraft comes into the Martian atmosphere at a screaming 24,000 kph. Even after slowing down with a parachute or inflatable, it would be traveling well above the speed of sound. Simply sparking a rocket flame would be something like trying to light a candle while someone is blowing on the wick the entire time. And once you had your thruster going, it would be injecting that flame into an extremely dynamic environment, something our technology has never had to handle before.

Nasa has done wind tunnel tests to look at this problem before, once in the 60s and 70s for the Viking landers, and again more recently. The good news is the testing shows that supersonic rockets are theoretically possible. The bad news is that Nasa is not working on this program anymore.

While Nasa may yet pick up testing for this again, a member of the private spaceflight business may be leapfrogging them. SpaceX is working to create reusable rocket tanks that descend from orbit and land back at their launch pad. The company is planning to test supersonic retropropulsion later this year, which could be used both on Earth and in an eventual Mars mission.

Keeping the crew healthy
Space is a dangerous place to send complicated, delicately tuned systems, and "perhaps the most complex system of them all is the human body," said health specialist Saralyn Mark, president of SolaMed Solutions, which consults with Nasa's health and medical office.

Ironically, the thing responsible for powering most life on Earth, the sun, is also the most deadly part of space travel for living organisms.

Once outside the protective magnetic field of our planet, solar radiation would accumulate in an astronaut's body, raising his or her risk of cancer. Recent data from Nasa's Curiosity spacecraft have helped quantify just how risky background radiation levels are. Massive explosions like solar flares or energetic particle events could throw potentially lethal doses of radiation right at a spaceship.

That's why the private manned mission to flyby Mars in 2018, Inspiration Mars, is planned for a time of low activity from the sun, when the chance of a solar outburst is lowest. Though, lowering solar activity increases levels of radiation streaming in from the galaxy, which would also be hazardous.

The trip out to Mars would probably take between seven and nine months, and humans would need to be protected the entire time.

Currently, the most feasible solution is to line a spacecraft with water, which would absorb radiation and provide some amount of shelter during a solar storm. But water is heavy, and any added weight on a mission is an added cost. In the future, the capability to create a mini-magnetic field to protect a crew could be developed, but this is years or possibly decades away.

Aside from radiation, the biggest challenges for a manned Mars trip will be microgravity, which causes a host of odd medical conditions, and isolation, which can bring on a range of psychological issues.

The record for continuous time spent in space is held by a few pioneering Russians, who remained aboard the Mir space station for periods up to a year or longer. "That's pretty much the limit of our understanding," said Richard S. Williams, Nasa's chief health and medical officer. "And when you're talking about going to Mars, that's up to 30 months for a round-trip."

What we do know is that extended stays in zero-g cause bone and calcium degradation, muscle loss, and a recently-identified issue that may stem from swelling of the optic nerve. If left unchecked, astronauts arriving on Mars could be weak, brittle-boned, and possibly blind.

Medical advances and regular exercise seem to help some of the biological problems of space travel. Nasa is currently planning to have its astronauts undergo long stays of up to a year on the International Space Station to better understand these factors.

But the psychological issues that a crew en route to Mars will face are largely unknown. With the ISS, Earth is a relatively short Soyuz ride away, and astronauts can gaze down upon it. But crewmembers on a Martian trip would have no way to abort their mission and would suffer an ever-increasing time delay in communication with home.

There have been other isolated group experiments that offer some insight into how a Mars crew might fare. The Biosphere-2 experiments of the 1990s had seven or eight people stay in a large simulated environment for two years at a time. "All crewmembers in Biosphere-2 agreed that the psychological issues were the biggest issue," said Taber MacCallum, co-founder of Paragon Space Development and a participant in Biosphere-2.

The longest simulation approximating a Mars trip so far has been the Mars 500 mission, which had six men stay for 500 days in a sealed room while researchers monitored the results. The participants in this experiment became lethargic and bored. One of them became depressed. Only two out of the six crewmembers experienced no real problems and only one kept busy and active, with no deterioration of cognitive performance.

A Mars mission would test the limits of isolated human groups.

Crewmembers would probably have to pass through long-term screenings to make sure they are fit both physically and mentally.
Living off the land
With freezing temperatures and an arid environment, Mars may not seem like the best place to set up camp. But there is a wealth of materials on the Red Planet that astronauts could use to their advantage.

Nasa and other space agencies call this in-situ resource utilisation (ISRU) and it basically means living off the land. A machine could be sent to Mars ahead of astronauts that might extract oxygen from the carbon dioxide atmosphere. Or elements in the soil could be isolated and then used for building materials or rocket fuel.

As has been recognised in recent decades, Mars has a lot of water locked up in ice. In certain places, there are enough ice crystals in the soil that a robot could simply scoop up a heap. "Prior plans [to go to Mars] said we have to bring all this water," said space physicist Jim Green, Nasa's director of planetary exploration. "Now we say, bring a straw."

Though often discussed, ISRU technologies are something that have never been developed. Nasa would have to demonstrate that living off the extraterrestrial land is feasible.

Human missions to Mars also often call for some sort of crop growing capabilities. At first blush, the idea of farming on Mars seems like a reasonable plan. Your astronauts are going to want fresh vegetables and a farm could lessen the amount of freeze-dried food they might have to take.

[Quote"]We currently don't have the capability to land people on Mars, plain and simple[/pullquote]

But growing crops on another planet is tricky. You wouldn't want your crew to rely on the food they produce, said Taber MacCallum, co-founder of Paragon Space Development, which makes life-support systems for space. Plants are finicky. If the crew makes "one mistake, they all die," he said.

Looking at the amount of food you'd get out of farming for the amount of energy you'd have to put in, and considering all the temperature controls and other systems technology necessary, MacCallum estimates it would take 15 to 20 years of continuous habitation on Mars before it would be worth putting in an agricultural system.
Protecting ourselves and the planet
Earth is the only place we know of with life. But that doesn't mean something else isn't out there.

Because of this possibility, Nasa and other spacefaring nations have agreed to follow strict planetary protection standards. When the Apollo 11 astronauts came back from the moon, Nasa quarantined them for three weeks just to make sure they weren't harboring some terrible space virus that would destroy mankind. The procedure was repeated until Apollo 14, when scientists felt confident that there was no harm.

The moon is sterile. Mars is another case altogether. Evidence suggests that the Red Planet may have once been capable of supporting life. There is a slim but non-zero chance that something is still alive on the planet and could potentially be virulent.

Alongside the possibility of destroying mankind with Mars microbes, we also want to avoid the opposite problem. Humans come with their own smorgasbord of bacteria and fungi (your body has 10 microbial cells to every human cell in it) and right now there's nothing we can do to prevent some human contamination from leaking out onto Mars. Future technologies will have to improve our ability to seal ourselves from the dangers of Mars and Mars from the dangers of us.

To adhere to the strictest planetary protection protocols, perhaps the best course would be to spend a few missions without humans on the surface of Mars. People could park in orbit or set up camp on one of Mars' moons and teleoperate rovers and other robots on the surface in near-real time. They could pick over the surface for evidence of life and perhaps uncover areas that might be safer to land in. Future technologies could also help prevent Earth contaminants from infecting Mars for when we actually land people.

In the grand scheme of things, engineering challenges are easy. It's the social and political aspects of a manned Mars mission that are likely to be toughest.
Dealing with dust
"The number one problem on the surface of Mars is going to be dust," said Grant Anderson, chief engineer of Paragon Space Development, which makes life-support systems for space.

The arid Martian environment has created ultra-tiny dust grains flying around the planet for billions of years. These fines are not quite like anything we have on Earth.

The only similar situation we have faced before was the moon dust that the Apollo missions encountered. The ultra-sharp and abrasive moon soil was recognised as something that could clog up machinery and damage basic functions. "We spent $17 million (£11 million) trying to solve dust problems and I don't know of one that worked," said Anderson. "John Young [commander of Apollo 16] was out on the moon brushing thermal panels with a pig-hair brush and it didn't work well."

For a human crew on the surface, living on Mars will be like living in a giant salt flat. The dust will be caustic and the crew's tools will need to be extra-hardy. During Apollo 17, astronaut Harrison Schmitt threw his geologic hammer away because the handle corroded off after just three days.

Keeping the crew as free of dust as possible will be even more important because Martian sand is thought to be toxic. Though little is known at this point, Curiosity and a previous mission, the Mars Phoenix lander, proved that the Martian soil is chock full of chemicals called perchlorates. These substances, which are basically highly chlorinated salts, can cause problems in the human thyroid gland. The issue is not well understood but researchers have labelled perchlorate "an emerging chemical of concern" in Earth water supplies.

The dust on Mars may also contain carcinogenic material and produce allergic reactions or pulmonary problems in humans, similar to the lunar hay fever experienced by Apollo astronauts. Missions will need to know how the Martian dust will interact with the humidity in a human habitat or else it could burn human skin like lye or laundry bleach.

Curiosity is helping scientists understand the extent to which Mars dust poses a hazard to human health. But "precursor missions should have some test of how dust is going to kill you," said Anderson. His company has been developing seals that they think can keep the dust out but they will need extensive experimentation to make sure they work.
Making the plan
In the grand scheme of things, engineering challenges are easy.

It's the social and political aspects of a manned Mars mission that are likely to be toughest.

Currently, many different plans are floating around. Nasa has its Design Reference Architecture (.pdf). SpaceX and Inspiration Mars have their visions. Other space agencies are weighing in with their own ideas. But at some point, one of these will have to be chosen as the plan.

No one knows exactly how much a human mission will cost but it is likely to run to tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars.

Adjusted for inflation, each Apollo landing cost roughly $18 billion (£12 billion), and a Mars mission would be an order of magnitude greater in difficulty. It seems most likely that an undertaking of that scale will be led by an international partnership. That requires everything to be outlined in formal commitments between participating countries. The only similar space mission, building the International Space Station, required about five years for the countries involved to hammer out their deals.

The plan would also have to be flexible. The world is complicated and multi-year missions need to cope with changing political landscapes and economic downturns.

We often have a vision for beautiful machinery in space, says Sam Scimemi, Nasa's director of the ISS: Something like the majestic wheeled space station in Stanley Kubrick's 2001:A Space Odyssey. "What we got with the ISS is not as pretty or sexy as a big rotating wheel," Scimemi said. "But this is what the politics, budget, and technical capability all provided for. After all the dreaming, this is what was built."

There are many that wish for a new Space Race to spur on the US to Mars. But the future is not going to be like the past and the very unique set of circumstances leading to the Apollo project are not likely to be repeated.

There are certainly new players that did not exist in the previous Space Age. Private companies have set their sights on the Red Planet, in particular Inspiration Mars and SpaceX, and there are probably many who believe commercial industry should go it alone. "But at current levels of technology, governments are going to play a big role," said space policy expert Scott Pace of the George Washington University. "Human space exploration is driven by visions and hopes, but they must be grounded in facts and analysis. Fantasies don't get you to space."

Pace outlined the best ways to get countries to sign off on an ambitious plan like a manned Mars mission. "Destinations are really just symbols, proxies for skills, inspirations, values," he said. "The US is not going beyond low-Earth orbit without international partners. Apollo isn't going to happen again. I think our partners are willing to go to the moon and Mars with us, but I don't think they're going to go without us."
This story originally appeared on Wired.com. Click through for more images

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Why we can't send humans to Mars yet, and how we'll fix that

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While humans have dreamed about going to Mars practically since it was discovered, an actual mission in the foreseeable future is finally starting to feel like a real possibility. But how real is it? Nasa says it's serious about one day doing a manned mission while private companies are jockeying to present ever-more audacious plans to get there.

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For my info gathering, I have chosen to focus on an infographic that I have found through space.com that illustrates how radiation would effect people on Earth. From what I can understand, Mars does not exactly provide a magnetic field or an atmosphere that would provide an ample amount of protection which would give humans a hospitable environment to live in. Quite simply, humans, as illustrated by this infographic, are going to need to find ways to provide ample amounts of protection for themselves when it comes to radiation.

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This article basically points out the flaws of the Mars One project. They are factually breaking down the claims made by the Mars One organization and proving them, in a sense, false...or better yet, unfeasible.

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The five British 'hopefuls' for a private (non-profit) manned mission to Mars have been announced.

Based on current technical, logistical, financial and practical considerations... it's unlikely any of these people are going to Mars.

That is not because going to Mars is impossible. It isn't. NASA still wants to do it by the 2030s, depending on a massive boost in funding and a lot of new inventions. And for Mars One to send astronauts to Mars by 2024 would therefore be an incredible, beautiful feat.

Sadly, it looks pretty unlikely.

Sydney Do at MIT told Popular Mechanics recently after the publication of its controversial, but detailed feasibility study into the Mars One mission:

"One of the biggest claims made by the Mars One team is that absolutely no new technology needs to be developed for the success of their mission, which is setting up a colony on Mars. We found that there are several cases for systems like the environmental control and life support where thats just not true.

Even if some of these technologies did exist, we discovered that over time, the Mars One mission would become exceedingly expensive and unsustainable."

Bas Lansdorp, CEO of Mars One, posted his response to the MIT study shortly after its publication. The authors of the report also hosted an AMA on Reddit, which you can read here.
Here is a brief list of the questions we don't have specific answers to surrounding any manned mission to Mars, ahead of a meeting to discuss exactly that taking place in May 2015.
The proposed cost is... thrifty.:
The Mars One team says that a mission to put four people on Mars for the first time will cost $6 billion, plus another $4 billion for subsequent supply missions. A landmark MIT study into the feasibility of the Mission said that this is wildly optimistic. If the astronauts on Mars were to be kept alive with resupply missions for any length of time the ongoing costs would be (literally) astronomical, the study said. Mars One says it has based the cost estimate on extensive feasibility studies. It also says it can cut costs compared to governments. By comparison the International Space Station, which has kept humans alive just 350 miles from Earth for 14 years has so far cost closer to $150 billion.

Fuelling a manned Mars mission is harder than it sounds:
Some estimates say around 80% of the mass required to be lifted into space for a manned Mars craft would be fuel. In Earth orbit fuel is tricky, not just because it is heavy but also because it has a tendency to leak, and explode if not vented regularly. For ISS-based fuel storage systems that means a loss of at least 4% of hydrogen fuel a month, which if the same thing were true for a Mars craft being built in orbit would mean losing half its fuel in only a year.

Food, Toilets, Showers
Keeping humans clean in a can with no fresh water is hard. The ISS requires constant resupply missions to do this, and sends its waste back to Earth to burn up in the atmosphere. On a Mars mission lasting for 210 days there would be no way to throw away that waste without using more fuel (which is a problem already, see above). In addition, we don't currently have the sanitation system ready to go that can use the same limited amount of water for up to two years. Again, this is far from impossible - but that's not the same thing as having already been invented.

We don't know how to land:
Many Mars landings crash. All of the landings that have succeeded so far are much, much, much easier than landing a crew and supplies would be - largely because of weight. Light things can land on Mars with parachutes. The Curiosity rover (the size of a small car) landed with the help of a retrorocket-boosted 'sky crane'. Mars One has said it might use retrorockets to land the crew -- but the weight involved is enormous, and there are no detailed plans on how to do this without avoiding massive problems with turbulence. We just don't know how to land a human safely on Mars.

There is no such thing as a ready-made Mars Habitat:
As far as is public, no one has invented, tested and built a Mars habitat with the required life support systems, durability, protection from radiation and shielding against meteorites that would be needed to survive on Mars for any amount of time.

What spacesuit?
No one has tested and built a Mars-capable spacesuit that would last for long periods, again as far as we know. NASA has designs, and Mars One knows the issues involved... but that's all we know so far. As astronaut Chris Hadfield said last year:

What rover?
No one has tested and built a Mars rover designed for long-term operation by humans, including the necessary fuel systems. Mars One plans to launch its rover to Mars in 2020. That's five years away.

Gravity sickness
The lower gravity on Mars - let alone the zero gravity experienced on the way - would cause huge physiological changes and problems for any astronaut. Part of the reason for NASA building the ISS is to test and explore these issues. Those questions are still open. The longest any human has spent in space at one time is about a year, and on returning to Earth gravity they were severely incapacitated due to muscle loss, calcium degradation and thinned bones. New missions for astronauts to spend even longer in space are taking place this year. But the answers remain unclear. It is possible that by the time the Mars One crew got to Mars, they wouldn't be able to stand up, and might also be blind. It might be possible to counteract this, but we don't know how.

You might get Martian Plague
As far as we can tell there is nothing living on Mars. But there is a slight chance that something there could be virulent and could kill us. Worse, there is a high chance that we would contaminate anything interesting and organic that is still there by landing without proper procedures to protect against that.

So - is Mars One impossible? No. Not even MIT says that:

"We're not saying, black and white, Mars One is infeasible," Olivier de Weck, of MIT, said last year. "But we do think it's not really feasible under the assumptions they've made. We're pointing to technologies that could be helpful to invest in with high priority, to move them along the feasibility path."

The point is that to claim the five UK Mars One candidates are "going to Mars" is - at best - optimistic. We are inventing our way to Mars - gradually. But we're not there yet.

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This Is Why The Mars One 'Hopefuls' Are Probably Not Going To Mars

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The five British 'hopefuls' for a private (non-profit) manned mission to Mars have been announced. Based on current technical, logistical, financial and practical considerations... it's unlikely any of these people are going to Mars. That is not because going to Mars is impossible. It isn't.

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This article talks about the possible discovery of water near Mars' equator. If this is true, it could help colonists if they do end up on Mars. They might have a water supply that already exists, increasing their odds of survival.

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Could the Martian equator be wet? A surprising new analysis of old data suggests that water ice might be hiding beneath the soil at a latitude that scientists previously thought was not possible, reports Space.com.

The revelation comes after data from the neutron spectrometer aboard NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft picked up significant levels of hydrogen at lower latitudes on the Red Planet. Though the Mars Odyssey data was originally collected from 2002 to 2009, this is the first time scientists have used the neutron spectrometer to look for water. That's because the neutron spectrometer is not actually intended for the detection of water, but it can detect hydrogen.

Using advanced image-reconstruction techniques, researchers improved the spatial resolution of the data to 180 miles, twice the previous resolution of 320 miles. The extra resolution allows researchers to more accurately detect hydrogen, and therefore make more sophisticated predictions about the form that the hydrogen has taken.

"It was as if we'd cut the spacecraft's orbital altitude in half, and it gave us a much better view of what's happening on the surface," explained Jack Wilson, the study's principal investigator.

Although it's still not possible to say for sure that the extra hydrogen detected by the method is indicative of water ice, the odds of finding water along Mars' equatorial region have gone up significantly. The data at least makes it worth a closer look.

If water is hiding along the Martian equator, it's a mystery as to how it got there; water in this region was believed to be impossible. Even if ice found its way to the lower latitudes after being blown there or deposited in some other fashion, it's unclear how ice along the equator could be preserved.

"Perhaps the signature could be explained in terms of extensive deposits of hydrated salts, but how these hydrated salts came to be in the formation is also difficult to explain," speculated Wilson. "So, for now, the signature remains a mystery worthy of further study, and Mars continues to surprise us."

However water got to the equator, its potential presence makes a future human mission to the planet much more feasible. Astronauts wouldn't need to bring so much water with them; they could live off the land to an extent. A sustained water source along the planet's warmest latitudes would also open to door for long-term colonization, perhaps even some limited agriculture.

It's all the more reason to be excited about the prospect of future manned missions to the Red Planet, such as those recently announced by SpaceX's Elon Musk, which could launch as soon as 2024.

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Water ice might exist along Mars' equator, and scientists don't know how it got there

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Could the Martian equator be wet? A surprising new analysis of old data suggests that water ice might be hiding beneath the soil at a latitude that scientists previously thought was not possible, reports Space.com. The revelation comes after data from the neutron spectrometer aboard NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft picked up significant levels of hydrogen at lower latitudes on the Red Planet.

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This article talks about the problems that arise from going to Mars and what Elon Musk has done to address them. Some solutions have been created, such as creating reusable rockets and figuring out how to use methane for cheaper more sustainable fuel, but there are many other issues that still need to be addressed. The three pointed out in this article are 1) How to keep the planet clean once we get there, 2) The need to warm up the temperature and compress the atmosphere, and 3) The issue of cosmic radiation.

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Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX and Tesla, has released new details of his vision to colonize parts of the solar system, including Mars, Jupiter's moon Europa, and Saturn's moon Enceladus. His gung-ho plans-designed to make humans a multiplanetary species in case civilization collapses-include launching flights to Mars as early as 2023.

The details, just published in the journal New Space, are certainly ambitious. But are they realistic? As someone who works on solar system exploration, and the European Space Agency's new Mars rover in particular, I find them incredible in several ways.

First of all, let's not dismiss Musk as a Silicon Valley daydreamer. He has had tremendous success with rocket launches to space already. His paper proposes several interesting ways of trying to get to Mars and beyond-and he aims to build a "self-sustaining city" on the red planet.

The idea depends on getting cheaper access to space-the paper says the cost of trips to Mars must be lowered by "five million percent." An important part of this will be reusable space technology. This is an excellent idea that Musk is already putting into practice with impressive landings of rocket stages back on Earth-undoubtedly a huge technological step.

Making fuel on Mars and stations beyond it is something he also proposes, to make the costs feasible. Experiments toward this are underway, demonstrating that choosing the right propellant is key. The MOXIE experiment on the NASA 2020 rover will investigate whether we can produce oxygen from atmospheric CO ₂ on Mars. This may be possible. But Musk would like to make methane as well-it would be cheaper and more reusable. This is a tricky reaction which requires a lot of energy.

Yet, so far, it's all fairly doable. But the plans then get more and more incredible. Musk wants to launch enormous spaceships into orbit around Earth where they will be refuelled several times using boosters launched from the ground while waiting to head to Mars. Each will be designed to take 100 people and Musk wants to launch 1,000 such ships in the space of 40 to 100 years, enabling 1 million people to leave Earth.

There would also be interplanetary fuel-filling stations on bodies such as Enceladus, Europa, and even Saturn's moon Titan, where there may have been, or may still be, life. Fuel would be produced and stored on these moons. The aim of these would be to enable us to travel deeper into space to places such as the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud.

The "Red Dragon" capsule is proposed as a potential lander on such missions using propulsion in combination with other technology rather than parachutes as most Mars missions do. Musk plans to test such a landing on Mars in 2020 with an unmanned mission. But it's unclear whether it's doable, and the fuel requirements are huge.
Pie in the sky?
There are three hugely important things that Musk misses or dismisses in the paper. Missions such as the ExoMars 2020 rover-and plans to return samples to Earth-will search for signs of life on Mars. And we must await the results before potentially contaminating Mars with humans and their waste. Planetary bodies are covered by "planetary protection" rules to avoid contamination, and it's important for science that all future missions follow them.

Another problem is that Musk dismisses one of the main technical challenges of being on the Martian surface: the temperature. In just two sentences he concludes:

It is a little cold, but we can warm it up. It has a very helpful atmosphere, which, being primarily CO₂ with some nitrogen and argon and a few other trace elements, means that we can grow plants on Mars just by compressing the atmosphere.

In reality, the temperature on Mars drops from about zero degrees Celsius during the day to nearly -120 degrees Celsius at night. Operating in such low temperatures is already extremely difficult for small landers and rovers. In fact, it is an issue that has been solved with heaters in the design for the 300kg ExoMars 2020 rover-but the amount of power required would likely be a show-stopper for a "self-sustaining city."

Musk doesn't give any details for how to warm the planet up or compress the atmosphere-each of which are enormous engineering challenges. Previously, science fiction writers have suggested " terraforming"-possibly involving melting its icecaps. This is not only changing the environment forever but would also be challenging in that there is no magnetic field on Mars to help retain the new atmosphere that such manipulation would create. Mars has been losing its atmosphere gradually for 3.8 billion years-which means it would be hard to keep any such warmed-up atmosphere from escaping into space.

The final major problem is that there is no mention of radiation beyond Earth's magnetic cocoon. The journey to and life on Mars would be vulnerable to potentially fatal cosmic rays from our galaxy and from solar flares. Forecasting for solar flares is in its infancy. With current shielding technology, just a round-trip manned mission to Mars would expose the astronauts to up to four times the advised career limits for astronauts of radiation. It could also harm unmanned spacecraft. Work is underway on predicting space weather and developing better shielding. This would mitigate some of the problems-but we are not there yet.

For missions farther afield, there are also questions about temperature and radiation in using Europa and Enceladus as filling stations-with no proper engineering studies assessing them. These moons are bathed in the strongest radiation belts in the solar system. What's more, I'd question whether it is helpful to see these exciting scientific targets, arguably even more likely than Mars to host current life, as "propellant depots."

The plans for going further to the Kuiper belt and Oort cloud with humans is firmly in the science fiction arena-it is simply too far and we have no infrastructure. In fact, if Musk really wants to create a new home for humans, the moon may be his best bet-it's closer after all, which would make it much cheaper.

That said, aiming high usually means we will achieve something-and Musk's latest plans may help pave the way for later exploration.

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How Plausible Is Elon Musk's Plan to Colonize Mars?

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Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX and Tesla, has released new details of his vision to colonize parts of the solar system, including Mars, Jupiter's moon Europa, and Saturn's moon Enceladus. His gung-ho plans-designed to make humans a multiplanetary species in case civilization collapses-include launching flights to Mars as early as 2023.

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This article outlines all of the problems with going to mars like the cost and the complexity of planning a city. It also outlines the hazards involved like cosmic rays and the lack of water and food on the planet.

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(Image: © 20th Century Fox)

Paul Sutter is a research fellow at the Astronomical Observatory of Trieste and visiting scholar at the Ohio State University's Center for Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics (CCAPP). Sutter is also host of the podcasts Ask a Spaceman and RealSpace, and the YouTube series Space In Your Face. He contributed this article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Ah, Mars. The place that dreams are made of. As long as those dreams involve a poisonous, tenuous atmosphere, inhospitable cold and lots and lots of red. Still, people seem to want to go there. But will we ever make it?

"Yes," if you ask Elon Musk. I agree, but it probably won't be as easy as you might think, even if you think it's going to be really really hard.

Gravity doesn't know when to give up

(Image: © Space.com Store)

What's the problem? Pick up the nearest object and throw it. I don't care if there are people around you. Do it. This is an experiment. This is science. Note how far the object goes before it hits the ground. Now pick it up and throw it harder. It went further, didn't it?

Part of the reason you didn't throw it as far as your ego thought you would was air resistance. Plowing through the atmosphere like a bull in a molecular china shop, the object quickly loses speed. But the actual "hitting the ground" part is due to gravity. If you took away all the air, your thrown object would still eventually hit the ground.

In an airless world, no matter how hard you throw the object, it will reach the ground in the same amount of time. That's because gravity only works in the "down" direction, not the "over" direction, so for all gravity cares, you might as well have just lazily dropped it. But the harder you throw it, the more speed it will have, and the farther it will go before inevitably hitting the ground.

Or maybe not so inevitably. Imagine throwing something so hard that in the few seconds before it hits the ground, it reached the other side of a house. Or maybe a street. Throw it harder and you could get it across town. Across the country. Even faster: across an ocean.

Imagine throwing it so fast that by the time gravity gets around to doing its thing, the Earth has curved away from it. Gravity keeps on tugging at the object, but it frustratingly keeps missing the ground.

Ta-da: orbit!

How fast is orbital fast? Around 18,000 miles per hour (or 11 kilometers per second), give or take. There is, after all, an actual atmosphere to deal with.

You can certainly go slower and still visit space. Just make sure you packed a heat shield, because you're coming back down. You can also go even faster than orbital speed and escape the jealous clutches of Earth's gravity altogether, which is what it takes to get to Mars.

Getting away from it all

And that's the fundamental challenge. There just aren't many ways of pushing stuff that fast. Our best method so far involves blowing up stuff in a tube, and making sure to leave a hole in one side. Newton's laws do the rest. It seems primitive, but the engineers tell me these "rockets" are actually quite complicated.

We can easily send robots to Mars, because their feelings don't get hurt if you forget to pack the oxygen and food. But people are a different ... well, animal, altogether. Humans are heavy. Humans need to carry little bubbles of the Earth ecosystem with them everywhere they go. Humans need room to stretch. Humans want to bring human-centric niceties, like hammers and toothpaste and lima beans.

Oh, yeah, and we need to bring them back home, I suppose. So pack the spare rockets and extra fuel.

Let this sink in: at the time of this writing, we don't have the capacity to send humans beyond Low Earth Orbit, the very edge of space, let alone Mars. Getting to Mars is hard, folks, and it requires a lot of new technology.

And that's just enough stuff for a handful of hominids to poke around the place for a bit. A colony? Look around the city you're in, and marvel at all the junk it takes to get you through the day. Think of all the layers of civilization and organization (spontaneous or otherwise) it takes to get you dinner. Made of food. Cooked. On a plate. That you will clean up with water ... eventually. In a house. On a street. And on and on.

A city is a massively complicated thing. Sure, we've built them from the ground up before, but colonies on Earth have a few advantages, namely, a) breathable air, b) liquid water, c) dirt and d) proximity to other Earth-based cities. Even the U.S. National Science Foundation's Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station - the closest to a Mars colony you can get while keeping two feet on the Earth - enjoys most of these advantages, and is still a nightmare to keep alive.

Don't get zapped

And did I mention the cosmic rays? No? Well, now's a good time - cosmic rays are high-energy protons (and some heavier nuclei) zipping through the universe, generated in...well, we're not exactly sure, but probably supernovae and other cataclysmic events. The universe is swimming in them, and they cut through DNA like a hot knife through butter. The butter is you in this metaphor, just to be clear. On Earth the atmosphere makes for nice insulation, catching most of the deadliest cosmic rays, but some still make it through, possibly giving everyone - especially airline crews - a slightly elevated risk of cancer. [ Radiation Fears Shouldn't Hold Back Mars Colonization (Op-Ed )]

But a two-year journey to Mars? Exposure on the surface? Better make sure your transports and habitats are well-shielded or buried underground - or at least make sure you have some talented oncologists on staff.

Despite these challenges and more, it's not impossible to get people to Mars and start a viable colony. It's not like there's any physics-based reason preventing the escapades. It's just a question of engineering. And money.

Lots and lots of money.

The high cost of Martian real estate

SpaceX has an ambitious plan to get a colony on Mars through private investment in ever-larger, cheap, reusable rockets that could deliver a steady stream of people and supplies to slowly build up a colony over decades. It just takes lots of money.

NASA has an ambitious plan to build the Space Launch System, the biggest, most hard-core rocket ever made. With that kind of fire, you could send all sorts of stuff into space, including a crew to Mars. It just takes lots of money.

There are other ideas, such as Mars One ("I know, just leave everybody there, then we don't have to pay for a return ticket!") and Mars Direct, but in the end it takes time. And lots of money.

So eventually, we'll do it. Humans will go to Mars . Babies will be born there. Civilization will flourish - or flounder - on the Red Planet. It's just a matter of when, and of how much money we're willing to spend. Did I mention the money part?

Sure, if one day everyone decided that we don't need socks anymore, we could use the leftover savings to fast-track a Martian colony. Full of chaffed feet, but a colony nonetheless. We're certainly at the civilizational stage where sending humans to Mars is feasible, which is a huge first step. A hundred years ago, not only did we lack the technology, but also the economic wherewithal to entertain such a wacky notion.

That's the trick to getting to Mars: either we need to be so wealthy as a society that a trip is so economically insignificant that nobody cares, or there needs to be a large political (if led by NASA) or economic (if led by a company) incentive to do it. One or both of those scenarios is bound to happen, sooner or later.

Hopefully sooner.

Learn more by listening to the episode "Will we colonize Mars?" on the Ask A Spaceman podcast, available on iTunes and on the Web at http://www.askaspaceman.com. Thanks to Ann Fisher for the question that led to this episode! Ask your own question on Twitter using #AskASpaceman or by following Paul @PaulMattSutter and facebook.com/PaulMattSutter.
Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates - and become part of the discussion - on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Space.com.

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(Image: © 20th Century Fox) Paul Sutter is a research fellow at the Astronomical Observatory of Trieste and visiting scholar at the Ohio State University's Center for Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics (CCAPP). Sutter is also host of the podcasts Ask a Spaceman and RealSpace, and the YouTube series Space In Your Face.

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The United Arab Emirates is planning to build a mini-city experiment to hopefully discover how to create a self-sustaining settlement on Mars. The mini-city will be located on the outskirts of Dubai and will be staffed with an Emirates-led team of scientists and engineers whose job it will be to figure out how to accommodate up to 600,000 people on a self-sustaining settlement.

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Indoor ski resorts. Underwater hotel suites. Cloud-brushing mega-skyscrapers. High-end shopping malls the size of 50 football fields. Leave it to the United Arab Emirates, land of superlative everything, to lead the charge when building the world's largest - and, predictably, flashiest - Mars colony simulation.

When complete, the 1.9-million-square-foot Martian mini-city will give scientists a "viable and realistic" taste of what human colonization of the Red Planet might be like.

News of the so-called Mars Science City, which comes equipped with a price tag of $140 million (U.S.) and will be located in the Emirati desert on the outskirts of Dubai, comes just months after the country announced ambitious and not entirely surprising plans to colonize Mars by the year 2117.

Considering the Emirates' vast wealth and penchant for erecting seemingly impossible structures at a breakneck pace, the colonization of Mars by the UAE certainly isn't all that implausible. After all, Dubai, which is hyper-futuristic and located in an incredibly harsh climate, essentially already is a city-state imported from outer space.

No small potatoes: Mars Science City will enable scientists to simulate gardening and food production in the same conditions as a self-sustaining Martian settlement. (Rendering: Dubai Media Office)

If all goes as planned, an Emirates-led international team of scientists and engineers will have figured out how to merrily accommodate upwards of 600,000 erstwhile Earth dwellers in a self-sustaining settlement located some 34 million miles from home. It's a daunting task to be sure but not to worry - they've got 100 years to iron out the details. Colonies aside, the logistics behind the actual journey itself is substantial as it could take intrepid colonists up to nine months to reach their new Mars-bound digs. (As part of a separate space endeavor dubbed Emirates Mars Mission, the UAE government plans to send an unmanned probe to Mars by 2020.)

"The landing of people on other planets has been a longtime dream for humans. Our aim is that the UAE will spearhead international efforts to make this dream a reality," proclaimed Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the prime minister and vice-president of the UAE and ruler of the Emirate of Dubai, during the launch of the Mars 2117 Project in February. "The new project is a seed that we plant today, and we expect future generations to reap the benefits, driven by its passion to learn to unveil a new knowledge."

There's no place like dome

If the Mars 2117 Project is the "seed" of the Emirates' long-term ambitions to establish a habitable pied-à-terre on the surface of Mars, then the unveiling of Mars Science City is a clear indication that the UAE has started the gardening process with full gusto.

Spread out across multiple climate-controlled domes, the sprawling simulation - the Emirates News Agency is already touting it as "the most sophisticated building in the world" - will include laboratories dedicated to energy, water and food production as well as zones that accurately replicate conditions on the surface of Mars. What's more, a dedicated team will live within the colony for an entire year as part of an "experiential element" that aims to "form an important reference model for future innovation around sustaining life in a hostile planetary environment."

A museum located within the Mars Science City complex will include 'educational areas meant to engage young citizens with space, and inspire in them a passion for exploration and discovery.' (Rendering: Dubai Media Office)

And although the UAE has its sights firmly set on the Red Planet, those involved with this multinational collaborative initiative - the "best scientific minds from around the world" per the Emirates News Agency - also will be keen on addressing pressing issues back home including "global challenges such as food, water and energy security." Hey, sometimes you have to figure out how to populate a dust-swept, butterscotch-colored orb named after the Roman god of war in order to figure out how to better live on planet Earth.

"The UAE is a great country with vision and understanding of the challenges we face and the rapid changes our world is experiencing," says Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid. "We believe in the potential of space exploration, and in collaborating with global partners and leaders in order to harness the findings of this research and movement that seeks to meet people's needs and improve quality of life on Earth."

The UAE, a country defined by audacious architecture, impressive wealth and an unforgiving climate, plans to populate Mars by 2117. The construction of Mars Science City is just part of its Mars-colonizing ambitions. (Rendering: Dubai Media Office)

Considering that this is the UAE (aka ground zero for off-the-wall tourist attractions), Mars Science City wouldn't be complete without areas accessible to the general public. One open-to-visitors highlight comes in the form of an interactive space museum complete with walls that have been 3-D-printed using sand collected from the Emirati desert. The concept of 3-D printing human settlements on Mars using indigenous materials like soil and dust has been floating around for some time now - a test-run pairing similar technology with local sand seems like the logical first step.

As for the massive structure itself, its preliminary design comes courtesy of BIG, the namesake firm of lauded Danish architect Bjarke Ingels, which is working with the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre and Dubai Municipality on the project.

This sounds about right considering BIG's audacious creations, from tetrahedron apartment complexes to power plants with skiable roofs, all take on a playful, otherworldly quality. They swoop, they swirl, they spiral, they shatter architectural conventions and, sometimes, they look like they come from outer space. A huge multi-domed complex that, to quote Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, is dedicated to advancing "humanity's march into space" fits snugly into Ingels' own brilliant and fantastical oeuvre. A mock Martian colony also seems right at home among the futuristic landscape of Dubai, a city where skyline already reaches impatiently into the heavens.

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United Arab Emirates to build Martian mini-city

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Indoor ski resorts. Underwater hotel suites. Cloud-brushing mega-skyscrapers. High-end shopping malls the size of 50 football fields. Leave it to the United Arab Emirates, land of superlative everything, to lead the charge when building the world's largest - and, predictably, flashiest - Mars colony simulation.

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This article talks about how researchers are planning the design of the spacecraft that will carry people to Mars. It explains challenges with the technology and how they plan to overcome those challenges.

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Dava Newman's light blue eyes gleam as she regards a model of the most powerful rocket ever to come off a NASA drawing board. She places it on the coffee table in her stately sun-filled office at the agency's headquarters in Washington, D.C. "Orion's this little part on the top. All the rest is the heavy lift launch system," she adds with a chuckle.

The 18-inch-tall white plastic spacecraft model looks like something you might find in a hobby store, but it embodies the nation's greatest ambitions: Orion is the capsule that, if all goes according to plan, will take four people to Mars in the 2030s. It sits on a massive new rocket, known formally as the Space Launch System. In its initial iteration, the SLS will be 322 feet tall and 15 percent more powerful than the Saturn V rocket, which powered the Apollo missions to the Moon.

The reality of traveling 250 million miles is still so mind-blowing that it makes even one of the officials tasked with getting us there almost giddy. But NASA is already deep into the engineering phase of how to get to the Red Planet. "We're living it," says Newman, who was a professor of astronautics and engineering systems at MIT before she became NASA's deputy administrator a year ago. "That's what the future is. It's now for us."

In an interview at her office, Newman talked about what the agency officially calls the Journey to Mars. She allowed that a great deal of R&D has been achieved, what with 15 years of experience aboard the International Space Station. "That's been hugely important, because we're studying astronaut performance," she says. Yet there's no denying that living aboard the space station is only a beginning, given that the orbiting habitat, a few hundred miles away, is, in space-exploration terms, "Earth-reliant."

Just over the horizon, though, is the next big step into "cislunar space," the area between Earth and the Moon, which is some 239,000 miles away. "You're still Earth-reliant, but you're in deep space," Newman says. "We call that the Proving Ground," because the journeys will be farther and last longer, and the technologies will have to get more and more sophisticated. "That's the game-changer." In 2018, NASA hopes to launch the SLS and Orion together for the first time, though the capsule won't carry any people for Exploration Mission-1, a three-week trip that will take the spacecraft 40,000 miles beyond the Moon and back to Earth. Exploration Mission-2, when astronauts will travel into deep space in the Orion capsule, is slated for the 2020s.

Among the countless tech challenges that must be met before people can safely go to Mars (and back) is that of protecting astronauts from both cosmic and solar radiation, which in deep space are more potent and thus more harmful than what they encounter even over long periods aboard the space station. So researchers are designing new radiation-shielding spacesuits (Newman herself achieved a measure of geek fame for designing a new spacesuit before joining NASA) and habitats. Another problem way out there, of course, is the lack of stations in deep space, so the agency hopes to develop a solar electric propulsion system for deep-space flight.

If there's a job that sounds more science fictiony than that, perhaps it's manhandling an asteroid, a chore that, NASA insists, will yield useful new information about docking spacecraft, collecting extraterrestrial samples and moving multi-ton objects in space. This September, the agency is scheduled to launch a robotic spacecraft, OSIRIS-REx, which will fly to within a few miles of a near-Earth asteroid named Bennu, map it for several months and then get close enough to extend a robotic arm to gather a few ounces of surface material, which the craft will return to Earth by 2023. That sample is expected to contain new clues to planet formation and the potential impact of asteroids on Earth, but Newman also notes that "robotic capability is critical to the future and our whole Journey to Mars."

A subsequent mission, scheduled for late 2021, might remind movie buffs of Armageddon, the 1998 disaster thriller: A robotic spacecraft will make contact with an asteroid, possibly one named 2008 EV5; remove a boulder weighing more than ten tons; and maneuver the boulder to the Moon's orbit. An astronaut crew will fly to the boulder and collect samples for examination on Earth.

By the 2030s, Newman says, NASA should be poised. "We'll get to Martian orbit first, safe to say," she suggests, or perhaps to a Martian moon, "and then the absolute goal is boots on Mars." For such a voyage, measured in years, astronauts will have to become Earth-independent, devising ways to make fuel, water, oxygen and building materials with whatever resources the Red Planet offers. If that seems as fantastical as Matt Damon growing potatoes in The Martian, Newman shrugs: Astronauts have dined on lettuce and peppers grown aboard the space station.

"Successful exploration in human history-that's how it's been accomplished," she said. "You take what you can with you, but you have to make things and be self-sustaining."

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Inside the Grand Plan to Send Humans to Mars

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Dava Newman's light blue eyes gleam as she regards a model of the most powerful rocket ever to come off a NASA drawing board. She places it on the coffee table in her stately sun-filled office at the agency's headquarters in Washington, D.C. "Orion's this little part on the top.

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This article focuses on some of the health issues that astronauts can experience in space. NASA is conducting a rodent study on the ISS that will help us better understand how things like joint issues and eye degeneration happen so quickly in space so we can better prepare and prevent it for future long-term missions like Mars.

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Rodents Help NASA Take the Next Step to Mars

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NASA is conducting research to learn more about the long-term impact of extended human spaceflight. One experiment about to launch, Rodent Research-9, is contributing to this goal by sending rodents to the International Space Station, to study how a lack of gravity in space affects blood vessels, eyes and joints.

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This article is about how the biggest problem may with going to Mars may be the astronauts mental state. With missions lasting so long and costing so much money the article talks about the moon being a better place to test if man can survive in other places besides Earth. The moon is only 2-3 days away and it it much cheaper and less expensive to go there instead of Mars.

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Astronauts bound for Mars could go insane and develop serious psychological problems due to cosmic radiation, according to new research published Monday.

Scientists tested the long term brain damage of similar radiation on rodents, which caused cognitive impairments and dementia. Six months after the rodents were exposed to the radiation, the scientists and the rats were still performing poorly on behavioral tasks designed to test learning and memory, a study conducted by the University of California, Irvine (UCI). NASA estimates that a manned Mars mission would take between one and three years to carry out.

"This is not positive news for astronauts deployed on a two-to-three-year round trip to Mars," Dr. Charles Limoli, a professor of radiation oncology in UCI's School of Medicine, said in a press statement. "The space environment poses unique hazards to astronauts. Exposure to these particles can lead to a range of potential central nervous system complications that can occur during and persist long after actual space travel - such as various performance decrements, memory deficits, anxiety, depression and impaired decision-making."

Limoli noted that similar cognitive dysfunction is common in brain cancer patients who have received high-dose, radiation treatments. These dementia-like deficits in astronauts would take months of exposure to radiation to manifest, meaning that a lengthy mission to Mars could certainly put astronauts at risk. These developments could make it much more difficult for NASA to send a mission to Mars.

"Earth's Moon needs to be a priority in our lead-up to long-term Martian habitation," an aerospace engineer familiar with NASA Mars proposals who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told The Daily Caller News Foundation. "It's a convenient lab to answer all of our questions about human endurance outside of Earth's magnetosphere and in lower gravity. As the Moon is only ever about 2 to 3 days travel away (at worst), it gives us a test-bed that will pose greater challenges than a Mars mission at a location easily accessible for us to test and verify the numerous lingering hypotheses that are critical to human space flight to other planets."

Mars-bound spacecraft could be designed to handled some of the radiation with increased shielding, but the highly energetic charged particles would still cause dementia to strike the astronauts nonetheless.

Other NASA research into the psychological problems with Mars missions were much more positive. A study where six scientists simulated living on Mars for a year in a dome to determine if a NASA crew of three men and three women could live in close quarters over an extended period of time without a psychological breakdown, and the results were favorable.

"I can give you my personal impression which is that a mission to Mars in the close future is realistic," Cyprien Verseux, a French astrobiologist who participated in the study, said in a press statement. "I think the technological and psychological obstacles can be overcome."

NASA spent $1.2 million on the dome study, but it was run through the University of Hawaii. Another 520-day-long study in Russia came to a similar conclusion. NASA plans to conduct three similar experiments in the near future.

NASA currently plans to send real astronauts to Mars in 2030. The total costs of current plans to send Americans to Mars comes out to roughly $35 billion for a target landing of 2030. America is currently better prepared to visit Mars than it was to visit the Moon in the 1960s, according to a study by NASA's Johnson Space Center. The rocket intended to take American astronauts to Mars in 2030 passed its final full-scale tests in late June.

NASA already has plans to put a large manned space station in orbit above Mars by 2028. The station will remotely operate rovers, analyze samples off dirt and rock and even make short trips to Mars's two moons.
Follow Andrew on Twitter Send tips to [email protected]dailycallernewsfoundation.org. Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact [email protected] .

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national aeronautics and space administration

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Astronauts Going Insane Could Be Biggest Problem For Mars Mission

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Astronauts bound for Mars could go insane and develop serious psychological problems due to cosmic radiation, according to new research published Monday. Scientists tested the long term brain damage of similar radiation on rodents, which caused cognitive impairments and dementia.

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This article explains about 8 step to going to mars. From what I could tell it sounds like we have to do a lot more before we can get to Mars. But, we are getting closer to the goal. It states that if the deadline were stretched to the last year of the goal it would be feasible to make it. The article then goes on to take about the different problems we would have to face. Such as, building bigger rocket and landing them correctly, housing for the people to live in and the radiations that wed be exposed to.

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Mars as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope in August 2003.

Credit: NASA, J. Bell (Cornell U.) and M. Wolff (SSI)

After the red dust settles from President Barack Obama's reiteration of his ambitious goal to have humans reach Mars in the next two to three decades, the next question becomes: What will it take to get there?

"We have set a clear goal vital to the next chapter of America's story in space: sending humans to Mars by the 2030s and returning them safely to Earth, with the ultimate ambition to one day remain there for an extended time," Obama wrote in an op-ed on CNN.com yesterday (Oct. 11).

NASA has laid out detailed plans for the journey to Mars. It's feasible to get there by the 2030s - if that deadline is stretched out to the last year of the decade, said John Logsdon, a professor emeritus of political science and international affairs at the Space Policy Institute at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. [ 5 Mars Myths and Misconceptions]

Other experts say Obama's stated timeline is not bold enough.

"We are far closer today to sending humans to Mars than we were to sending men to the moon in 1961, and we were there eight years later," said Robert Zubrin, president of nonprofit organization The Mars Society and the author of "The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet," (Free Press, 2011). The next president should announce an ambitious goal to get to Mars by the end of the second term, or by 2024, Zubrin said. Otherwise, the momentum for the mission could be lost, and space exploration could be delayed further, he added. [ SpaceX to Mars: Awe-Inspiring Video Shows Vision for Red Planet Exploration]

Either way, before astronauts start packing their spacesuits and intergalactic playlists, scientists have to sort out a few problems.

Currently, the United States relies on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to get astronauts to the International Space Station. That is set to change, as private spaceflight companies have taken on the challenge of building a system to launch humans and cargo spaceward: Elon Musk's SpaceX is working on the Dragon robotic launch vehicles, while Boeing is building its CST-100, Logsdon said. Musk has also said that SpaceX's robotic launch vehicle could head off to Mars as soon as 2018. (A launch vehicle is a rocket-powered vehicle designed to send spacecraft or satellites into space.)

A Mars voyage requires a spacecraft that can carry multiple people, along with all the supplies for a three-year round-trip, including potential cargo items, said Bret Drake, an engineering specialist with Los Angeles-based Aerospace Corp., a nonprofit organization that researches launch vehicles, satellite systems, ground control systems and space technology for the federal government.

"To sustain a crew all the way to Mars means being able to launch rather heavy payloads, because you have to have the fuel and supplies for the round-trip," added Logsdon. "And there's no 7-Eleven on Mars where you can stock up to come home," he told Live Science.

One alternative is to create a giant spacecraft; another is to develop multiple smaller modules that can be launched separately into orbit and then assembled in space, Logsdon said. (Some of these modules could hold people while others could hold supplies, for instance).

Either way, the basic technology is there, Zubrin said. "It has to be larger than any we've built before," he said. Even so, "there isn't new science here."

Currently, Lockheed Martin is developing a four-person spacecraft called the Orion, which will sit atop the heavy-lift launch system, called the Space Launch System (SLS), that NASA is developing to take people into deep space. Orion already completed one successful test flight on Dec. 5, 2014, and is set to take a trip around the moon in 2018.

Launching a bigger spacecraft into deep space requires bigger rockets on any launch vehicles used. NASA plans to conduct a second test of what will be the world's largest rocket, which will be part of the SLS, sometime in 2021, according to NASA. SpaceX is also developing the Falcon Heavy rocket, which is designed to launch heavier payloads, including people, into space.

After people enter Mars' orbit, they need to land on the Red Planet. With past missions, friction, thermal effects and parachutes could provide the deceleration needed to land. But a parachute won't have enough stopping power for such heavy crafts.

However, scientists are making progress on that front.

For instance, SpaceX has shown that high-speed crafts can decelerate using supersonic retropropulsion, which involves firing engines while landing, Drake said. "We now have a feasible technical solution for how to get large vehicles to the surface of Mars," Drake said.

Astronauts have logged many weeks and months on the International Space Station (ISS), demonstrating the feasibility of long-term habitation systems, such as those that provide safe water, process waste, and filter air in space. Similar systems could be used for a stay on Mars, experts say.

The difference, however, is that the ISS is in low Earth orbit, just a few hours' trip to the home planet. If anything breaks, Earth can still come to the rescue. That won't be possible on Mars, which is at least a six- to nine-month journey, even when the planets are at their closest point to each other.

"One key advancement for the life-support system is increasing the reliability of the systems," Drake said. "For Mars missions, there are no quick-abort modes back to Earth, nor ground-up resupply if systems fail. So the life-support systems need to be reliable, and maintainable by the crew, for long periods of time - many years," Drake said.

Astronauts going on a Mars mission will need protection from two forms of radiation: solar proton events (or solar flares) and galactic cosmic radiation.

The first "can be mitigated by proper vehicle design, along with a dedicated storm shelter, such as a water wall made from the life-support system water supply," Drake said. (This would involve literally lining the walls with the water used for drinking and showering.)

Shielding people from galactic cosmic radiation is trickier. In free space, cosmic radiation levels are extremely high. However, the Mars Science Laboratory, which landed on the Martian surface aboard the rover Curiosity, has measured cosmic radiation levels and showed that radiation exposure at the surface of the red planet is similar to levels seen aboard the ISS, Drake said. Because the ISS is located in low Earth orbit, it is below the two doughnut-shaped radiation belts called Earth's Van Allen belts, which block from Earth many of the charged particles spewed from the sun, as well as from cosmic rays, Logsdon said.

One strategy may be to make the trip through free space very quickly, minimizing the exposure to the area with the highest radiation, Drake said.

"It's safer to be on the surface of Mars than free space," Drake said.

Before making the three-year round-trip to Mars, many of these long-term space systems will be tested in cislunar orbit, according to NASA's timeline of the journey to Mars. Sometime between 2018 and 2030, NASA plans to send crewed missions on spacewalks in the region of space near the moon. Some of these missions could last a year, in preparation for the epic voyage to Mars.

The plans also include a trip to redirect and sample material from an asteroid.

This will provide an opportunity to test out all of the elements of the Mars mission, while not being too far from Earth in case something goes wrong, Logsdon said.

Once people have taken the effort to get to Mars, they won't just turn around. The outbound voyage would take six to nine months, but explorers can't return until Mars and Earth are in good alignment relative to the sun, which could take 14 months, Logsdon said. (The return trip will be much shorter if the Earth and Mars are on the same side of the sun, rather than on opposite sides.)

In a way, Mars pioneers would be similar to "the explorers of the 16th century that went on ships across the ocean and were gone from their home country for a long time," Logsdon said.

Given that, it makes sense to make some kind of permanent structure, Logsdon said.

"You need, on the Martian surface, some sort of habitat," Logdson said. "You're not going to live inside a spacesuit all the time. Though it seems far-fetched, the movie "The Martian" showed a relatively realistic depiction of a potential Mars living setup, he added.

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Sending Humans to Mars: 8 Steps to Red Planet Colonization

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After the red dust settles from President Barack Obama's reiteration of his ambitious goal to have humans reach Mars in the next two to three decades, the next question becomes: What will it take to get there?

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This article describes a possible solution to a feasibility problem for colonizing Mars. It talks about how evidence of lava tubes have been discovered on the moon and Mars and how these spacious structures could provide shelter from radiation to humans traveling to and even colonizing Mars. Astronauts are able to train for this experience in similar tubes on Earth.

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Lava tubes as hidden sites for future human habitats on the Moon and Mars

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Lava tubes, underground caves created by volcanic activity, could provide protected habitats large enough to house streets on Mars or even towns on the moon, according to research presented at the European Planetary Science ...

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This article details some of NASA's concerns with Space X's trip to Mars, specifically radiation. Elon Musk responded to this concern by saying that there will be some increased risk of cancer, but he believes its relativity minor.

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On Tuesday, thousands of people stampeded into a lecture hall in Guadalajara, Mexico, to hear SpaceX CEO Elon Musk talk about how he wants to colonize Mars. The fervor of the audience gave the room an electric charge as Musk's speech got underway; people cheered as he avowed to create a self-sustaining Mars colony of 1 million people over the next 40 to 100 years.

Musk dazzled the crowd with concepts for two new types of vehicles: a massive reusable rocket booster and a giant transporter to carry people and cargo to Mars. He also laid out critical details about them - such as how big they would need to be and the materials they would be made from. And we got more insight into the new powerful Raptor engine that SpaceX is building to get this plan off the ground.
Once the electricity of the room died away, questions about his plan started to surface
Above all, Musk explained how aspects of this architecture - such as reusability and propellant choices - could bring down the cost of going to Mars to less than $200,000 a ticket. It was clear that he had been thinking about this minutiae for some time, and experts lauded the idea of trying to make such a massive feat realistic and affordable. "If you drive the costs of transportation down by four orders of magnitude, then everything becomes easy," Chris McKay, a planetary scientist at NASA Ames Research Center, tells The Verge. "You need more advanced life-support systems? Then you just ship them because they're cheaper to ship. It completely redefines the problem of how you support people on the surface of Mars."

But once the lecture was over and the electricity of the room died away, questions about his plan started to surface. Namely, very few details about human safety were laid out, and some of the engineering claims made by Musk seemed incredibly optimistic and even unattainable.

How exactly are people going to survive the trip?

Musk offered few details about life inside the spaceship that would transport people to Mars. Though he promised that the trip would be "fun" with restaurants and "zero-G" games, there were no concrete descriptions of how the passengers would pass the time and, crucially, stay alive.

The increased levels of radiation that people will experience on a trip to Mars is one of NASA's biggest concerns. Deep space is filled with tiny energized particles - either from solar flares or deep-space cosmic rays - that have the potential to harm people during the voyage. Astronauts on the International Space Station are largely shielded from this radiation thanks to Earth's magnetic field, which deflects most of the deep-space particles. But those on missions to Mars will not have the planet's magnetic shielding, and it's not known what effects that might have on the human body.

Musk was remarkably casual about this danger, though. "There's going to be some risk of radiation, but it's not deadly," said Musk. "There will be some slightly increased risk of cancer, but I think it's relatively minor." He went on to describe ways that Mars colonists could shield themselves - perhaps by reorienting the spaceship during a solar flare and huddling under a column of water. Still, he made it clear he wasn't particularly concerned about this problem. "The radiation thing is often brought up, but I think it's not too big of a deal," said Musk.
"The radiation thing is often brought up, but I think it's not too big of a deal."
This casual approach to radiation isn't shared by space researchers. "Radiation - he maybe down played it a little more than I would have," says McKay. "It's not a show stopper, but you have to worry about solar flares." McKay also says there needs to be a "storm shelter," in which fuel or some other liquid is used to slow down and deflect incoming particles. "He discussed this very quickly. It's a very sketchy solution, but that's basically the solution to radiation."

While there may be ways to hide from radiation, there's something that space travelers won't be able to escape on their way to Mars: microgravity. People's bodies go through dramatic changes in zero-G. They can lose bone density, their muscles atrophy, and their eyesight gets worse. What exercise regimes will the crew need to do? How will 80 days on a ship affect them? "Zero-G" games may be fun, but the entire mission will be for naught if people's bodies deteriorate on the way to Mars.

More questions remain once the crew reaches Mars. What will they do all day, and how long are they expected to stay before they take a return trip? Musk already has some ideas about how best to run the planet - he suggests a direct democracy - but it seems unlikely that the very first people on Mars will be tasked with figuring that. Instead, they'll be more concerned with staying alive.

Where will the colonists live on Mars and how will they survive?

Not once during his talk did Musk mention where people will live once they arrive on Mars. SpaceX's promo video of the mission conveniently ends right as the colonists get to the planet, providing little insight into what life in the company's colony would be like. During a Q&A after the event, Musk said that SpaceX only wants to build the "transport system" that will get people to the Red Planet. "It's like building the Union Pacific Railroad, and once that transport system is built, then there's a tremendous opportunity for anyone who wants to go to Mars and create something new or build the foundations of a new planet," said Musk.
It's unclear then who will be responsible for creating the habitats
It's unclear then who will be responsible for creating the habitats and actually constructing the "self-sustaining civilization" Musk envisions. Such a civilization will have to have key life-support systems to create breathable air, a way to clean and recycle water, and a way to feed the colonists. Once a colony gets big enough, it's not feasible for all the food to come from Earth, so people will have to eventually live off the land. That means learning to cultivate crops - no easy feat. Martian soil is thought to contain salts known as perchlorates, which are toxic for humans. So if crops are going to be grown on Mars, they either need to be grown in soil from Earth or the Martian soil must be somehow cleaned.

Musk also didn't address the health challenges people will face on the Red Planet. Radiation levels are still a concern on Mars, though there is some shielding from the planet's thin atmosphere. An artificial magnetic field could be created on Mars to deflect high-energy particles, Musk said. But he didn't provide any information of how this magnetic field would be created.

Neither did Musk address the problem of reduced gravity. Mars may have more gravity than space, but it still has about one-third the gravity of Earth. The effects of living for so long in this kind of gravity environment still aren't known. "We do not know at all what will be the human response, or the response of an embryo or a young child, to one-third gravity," says McKay.

What about planetary protection?

Another question is how - and if - Musk plans to prevent Earth microbes from contaminating Mars, and Mars microbes (if there are any) from contaminating Earth. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 requires that nations exploring other planets take measures against smearing Earth microbes across the Solar System. There are a few reasons for these precautions. One is scientific: containing our microbes means that if we find life on another planet, we can be reasonably sure it's not from our own world. The second is ethical: what if we introduce Earth life to another planet, where it outcompetes whatever undetected life is already there? And the third is for safety: if we're contaminating Mars, could it contaminate us?
A mission to colonize Mars with people would necessarily colonize the planet with the microbes
A mission to colonize Mars with people would necessarily colonize the planet with the microbes in our food, our waste, and on our bodies. Moving people back and forth would be an easy way to cross-contaminate the two worlds. But how we'll protect Mars from our microbes, and us from any on Mars, didn't factor into any of the plans that Musk discussed yesterday.

Adhering to planetary protection doesn't seem to be a concern of Musk's either when it comes to a colony. "So far, we're really not seeing any sign of surface life on Mars," he said at a press conference after the lecture. "But I think the planet we really need to consider protecting is Earth. That's where life exists as we know it in abundance." He then went on to say that people are "life's agents" and that we can help breathe life to the sterile world of Mars.

Things get even more dicey for planetary protection since Musk is a big proponent of "terraforming" Mars - the science fiction term for making the planet like Earth. Last year, Musk talked about nuking Mars to make it inhabitable during an interview on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. He later explained that he wants to nuke the sky over the Martian poles every couple of seconds, to create two tiny pulsing "suns" over the regions. The tiny suns would then warm up the planet and turn any frozen carbon dioxide into gas. CO2 is a potent greenhouse gas, and its presence in the atmosphere would make Mars warmer.

During his talk, Musk only briefly mentioned terraforming, saying that if we could warm up Mars we could create a thicker atmosphere and have flowing water. But he didn't present any plan for this and said at the press conference plans to terraform "would be up to the decision of the people on Mars."

How will the ships return to Earth?

Musk said he wants to bring his spaceships back to Earth but didn't go into detail about how. The SpaceX CEO said he wants to build methane propellant plants that would create fuel for the spaceships on the Red Planet, rather than carrying that fuel from Earth. Methane can be created on Mars with "relative ease," Musk said, because it can be synthesized from subsurface ice and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
The first ship to land on Mars would bring with it a "small propellant plant"
The first ship to land on Mars would bring with it a "small propellant plant," which would be expanded as time went on, Musk said. He noted that a large field of solar panels would be used to power the planet, but he didn't give any details on how this plant would be built or operated, nor how much fuel would be needed to make the return trips possible. "I won't go into detail here, but people can think about it offline," Musk said.

How can Musk make such short trips to Mars?

Musk's presentation today included some estimates for how long the spaceship's journeys would take - and they were all quite short, anywhere between 80 and 150 days. NASA's estimates that this trip would take a lot longer: the shortest estimate would still be more than half a year long, or about 210 days in between the two planets.

"I couldn't quite follow where that was coming from," Bobby Braun, an associate professor of space technology at the Georgia Institute of Technology, tells The Verge. "I think it'd be very hard to get there in the transfer times that he mentioned. When we send robotic missions to Mars, they tend to take nine months to get there."

Musk explained at the press conference that the estimates are based on how fast you can speed up the spaceship going to Mars. If the spaceship travels at six kilometers per second, then the trip can go from six or seven months to just three months. And potentially it could go even faster than that. But Musk said it would need a substantial amount of energy to get a spaceship to that speed and a substantial amount of energy to brake.

How is the whole Mars colonization plan going to be funded?

A big chunk of Musk's speech revolved around bringing down the cost of going to Mars. Given his estimates, it would take about $560 million to manufacture one booster, one spaceship, and one propellant tanker. Ultimately, that would mean a cost of less than $140,000 per ton to get to Mars. That seems relatively cheap for such a massive undertaking, but the truth is no one has a solid estimate for how much a human Mars mission would cost. Estimates have ranged from $200 billion and $400 billion to as high as $1.5 trillion.

Musk gave a number of different ways SpaceX could fund this endeavor, such as making higher profits and launching more satellites. But even with his low estimates, Musk still maintained SpaceX can't do this all on its own. He argued strongly for the need of collaboration with the government and private industry. It makes sense given that SpaceX has relied on partnerships for much of its business. NASA has been a fairly big investor in the company, but it remains to be seen if Musk's talk will be enough to woo the space agency to pitch in again. "In the future, there may be a NASA contract, there may not be," said Musk at the press conference. "I don't know."

Thanks to @NASA for putting their faith in us https://t.co/kCtBLPbSg8
- SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 27, 2016

There's no doubt that Musk knows rockets. He has a clear vision for the types of vehicles he thinks will make a Mars settlement both possible and affordable. And he's proven that he can deliver capable spacecraft, even if there are some questions surrounding the vehicle's' reliability.

But a human Mars settlement is more than just hardware. The lives of people will be at stake, and serious thought needs to be given to the safety of the first human settlers. Musk admitted that the first colonists would have to be prepared to die, but killing people either on the way to Mars or once they get there will defeat the entire purpose of creating a colony in the first place. SpaceX may consider itself just a transportation company, but if it wants to get in the business of transporting humans, the company needs to reassure the public it can get them to a destination in one piece.
Alessandra Potenza, Angela Chen, and Rachel Becker contributed to this report.
SpaceX trip to Mars simulation

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The biggest lingering questions about SpaceX's Mars colonization plans

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On Tuesday, thousands of people stampeded into a lecture hall in Guadalajara, Mexico, to hear SpaceX CEO Elon Musk talk about how he wants to colonize Mars. The fervor of the audience gave the room an electric charge as Musk's speech got underway; people cheered as he avowed to create a self-sustaining Mars colony of 1 million people over the next 40 to 100 years.

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This article details MIT's analysis of the feasibility of a Mars mission. They simulated what life on Mars would be like and ran many other tests. They did not rule out a Mars mission as impossible but stated that a considerable amount of progress would have to be made especially on technological issues.

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In 2012, the "Mars One" project, led by a Dutch nonprofit, announced plans to establish the first human colony on the Red Planet by 2025. The mission would initially send four astronauts on a one-way trip to Mars, where they would spend the rest of their lives building the first permanent human settlement.

It's a bold vision - particularly since Mars One claims that the entire mission can be built upon technologies that already exist. As its website states, establishing humans on Mars would be "the next giant leap for mankind."

But engineers at MIT say the project may have to take a step back, at least to reconsider the mission's technical feasibility.

The MIT researchers developed a detailed settlement-analysis tool to assess the feasibility of the Mars One mission, and found that new technologies will be needed to keep humans alive on Mars.

For example, if all food is obtained from locally grown crops, as Mars One envisions, the vegetation would produce unsafe levels of oxygen, which would set off a series of events that would eventually cause human inhabitants to suffocate. To avoid this scenario, a system to remove excess oxygen would have to be implemented - a technology that has not yet been developed for use in space.

Similarly, the Mars Phoenix lander discovered evidence of ice on the Martian surface in 2008, suggesting that future settlers might be able to melt ice for drinking water - another Mars One goal. But according to the MIT analysis, current technologies designed to "bake" water from soil are not yet ready for deployment, particularly in space.

The team also performed an integrated analysis of spare-parts resupply - how many spare parts would have to be delivered to a Martian colony at each opportunity to keep it going. The researchers found that as the colony grows, spare parts would quickly dominate future deliveries to Mars, making up as much as 62 percent of payloads from Earth.

As for the actual voyage to Mars, the team also calculated the number of rockets required to establish the first four settlers and subsequent crews on the planet, as well as the journey's cost.

According to the Mars One plan, six Falcon Heavy rockets would be required to send up initial supplies, before the astronauts' arrival. But the MIT assessment found that number to be "overly optimistic": The team determined that the needed supplies would instead require 15 Falcon Heavy rockets. The transportation cost for this leg of the mission alone, combined with the astronauts' launch, would be $4.5 billion - a cost that would grow with additional crews and supplies to Mars. The researchers say this estimate does not include the cost of developing and purchasing equipment for the mission, which would further increase the overall cost.

Olivier de Weck, an MIT professor of aeronautics and astronautics and engineering systems, says the prospect of building a human settlement on Mars is an exciting one. To make this goal a reality, however, will require innovations in a number of technologies and a rigorous systems perspective, he says.

"We're not saying, black and white, Mars One is infeasible," de Weck says. "But we do think it's not really feasible under the assumptions they've made. We're pointing to technologies that could be helpful to invest in with high priority, to move them along the feasibility path."

" One of the great insights we were able to get was just how hard it is to pull this [mission] off," says graduate student Sydney Do. "There are just so many unknowns. And to give anyone confidence that they're going to get there and stay alive - there's still a lot of work that needs to be done."

Do and de Weck presented their analysis this month at the International Astronautical Congress in Toronto. Co-authors include MIT graduate students Koki Ho, Andrew Owens, and Samuel Schreiner.
Simulating a day on Mars
The group took a systems-based approach in analyzing the Mars One mission, first assessing various aspects of the mission's architecture, such as its habitat, life-support systems, spare-parts requirements, and transportation logistics, then looking at how each component contributes to the whole system.

For the habitat portion, Do simulated the day-to-day life of a Mars colonist. Based on the typical work schedule, activity levels, and metabolic rates of astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS), Do estimated that a settler would have to consume about 3,040 calories daily to stay alive and healthy on Mars. He then determined crops that would provide a reasonably balanced diet, including beans, lettuce, peanuts, potatoes, and rice.

Do calculated that producing enough of these crops to sustain astronauts over the long term would require about 200 square meters of growing area, compared with Mars One's estimate of 50 square meters. If, as the project plans, crops are cultivated within the settlers' habitat, Do found that they would produce unsafe levels of oxygen that would exceed fire safety thresholds, requiring continuous introduction of nitrogen to reduce the oxygen level. Over time, this would deplete nitrogen tanks, leaving the habitat without a gas to compensate for leaks.

As the air inside the habitat continued to leak, the total atmospheric pressure would drop, creating an oppressive environment that would suffocate the first settler within an estimated 68 days.

Possible solutions, Do says, might include either developing a technology to extract excess oxygen or isolating the crops in a separate greenhouse. The team even considered using nitrogen extracted from the Martian atmosphere, but found that doing so would require a prohibitively large system. Surprisingly, the cheapest option found was to supply all the food required from Earth.

"We found carrying food is always cheaper than growing it locally," Do says. "On Mars, you need lighting and watering systems, and for lighting, we found it requires 875 LED systems, which fail over time. So you need to provide spare parts for that, making the initial system heavier."
Twisting the knobs
As the team found, spare parts, over time, would substantially inflate the cost of initial and future missions to Mars. Owens, who assessed the resupply of spare parts, based his analysis on reliability data derived from NASA repair logs for given components on the ISS.

"The ISS is based on the idea that if something breaks, you can call home and get a new part quickly," says Owens. "If you want a spare part on Mars, you have to send it when a launch window is open, every 26 months, and then wait 180 days for it to get there. If you could make spares in-situ, that would be a massive savings."

Owens points to technologies such as 3-D printing, which may enable settlers to manufacture spare parts on Mars. But the technology as it exists today is not advanced enough to reproduce the exact dimensions and functions of many space-rated parts. The MIT analysis found that 3-D printers will have to improve by leaps, or else the entire Mars settlement infrastructure will have to be redesigned so that its parts can be printed with existing technology.

While this analysis may make the Mars One program look daunting, the researchers say the settlement-analysis tool they've developed may help determine the feasibility of various scenarios. For example, rather than sending crews on one-way trips to the planet, what would the overall mission cost be if crews were occasionally replaced?

"Mars One is a pretty radical idea," Schreiner says. "Now we've built a tool that we can play around with, and we can twist some of the knobs to see how the cost and feasibility of the mission changes."

Tracy Gill, a technology strategy manager at NASA, says the tool may be applicable for assessing other missions to Mars, and points to a few scenarios that the group may want to explore using the settlement-analysis tool.

"This [tool] can provide a benefit to mission planners by allowing them to evaluate a larger spectrum of mission architectures with better confidence in their analysis," says Gill, who did not contribute to the research. "Included among those architectures would be options ranging from completely growing all food in situ with bioregenerative systems, to packaging all food products from Earth, to various combination of those two extremes."

Some of the students on this project were supported by NASA fellowships.

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In 2012, the "Mars One" project, led by a Dutch nonprofit, announced plans to establish the first human colony on the Red Planet by 2025. The mission would initially send four astronauts on a one-way trip to Mars, where they would spend the rest of their lives building the first permanent human settlement.

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This article explores  nontechnical problems that have not been  addressed in the conversation about going to Mars . It explores planetary protection of both Earth and Mars, the politics that will be present in space, such as who makes the rules, and the ethical implications of treating Earth as a dumping ground, the planet we ruined with climate change.

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Will it be only a few decades before Mars tourism is a reality? Credit: SpaceX, CC BY

Elon Musk has a plan, and it's about as audacious as they come. Not content with living on our pale blue dot, Musk and his company SpaceX want to colonize Mars, fast. They say they'll send a duo of supply ships to the red planet within five years. By 2024, they're aiming to send the first humans. From there they have visions of building a space port, a city and, ultimately, a planet they'd like to "geoengineer" to be as welcoming as a second Earth.

If he succeeds, Musk could thoroughly transform our relationship with our solar system, inspiring a new generation of scientists and engineers along the way. But between here and success, Musk and SpaceX will need to traverse an unbelievably complex risk landscape.

Many will be technical. The rocket that's going to take Musk's colonizers to Mars (code named the " BFR" - no prizes for guessing what that stands for) hasn't even been built yet. No one knows what hidden hurdles will emerge as testing begins. Musk does have a habit of successfully solving complex engineering problems though; and despite the mountainous technical challenges SpaceX faces, there's a fair chance they'll succeed.

As a scholar of risk innovation, what I'm not sure about is how SpaceX will handle some of the less obvious social and political hurdles they face. To give Elon Musk a bit of a head start, here are some of the obstacles I think he should have on his mission-to-Mars checklist.
Planetary protection
Imagine there was once life on Mars, but in our haste to set up shop there, we obliterate any trace of its existence. Or imagine that harmful organisms exist on Mars and spacecraft inadvertently bring them back to Earth.

These are scenarios that keep astrobiologists and planetary protection specialists awake at night. They've led to unbelievably stringent international policies around what can and cannot be done on government-sponsored space missions.

Yet Musk's plans threaten to throw the rule book on planetary protection out the window. As a private company SpaceX isn't directly bound by international planetary protection policies. And while some governments could wrap the company up in space bureaucracy, they'll find it hard to impose the same levels of hoop-jumping that NASA missions, for instance, currently need to navigate.

It's conceivable (but extremely unlikely) that a laissez-faire attitude toward interplanetary contamination could lead to Martian bugs invading Earth. The bigger risk is stymying our chances of ever discovering whether life existed on Mars before human beings and their grubby microbiomes get there. And the last thing Musk needs is a whole community of disgruntled astrobiologists baying for his blood as he tramples over their turf and robs them of their dreams.
Ecoterrorism
Musk's long-term vision is to terraform Mars - reengineer our neighboring planet as " a nice place to be" - and allow humans to become a multi-planetary species. Sounds awesome - but not to everyone. I'd wager there will be some people sufficiently appalled by the idea that they decide to take illegal action to interfere with it.

The mythology surrounding ecoterrorism makes it hard to pin down how much of it actually happens. But there certainly are individuals and groups like the Earth Liberation Front willing to flout the law in their quest to preserve pristine wildernesses. It's a fair bet there will be people similarly willing to take extreme action to stop the pristine wilderness of Mars being desecrated by humans.

How this might play out is anyone's guess, although science fiction novels like Kim Stanley Robinson's " Mars Trilogy" give an interesting glimpse into what could transpire once we get there. More likely, SpaceX will need to be on the lookout for saboteurs crippling their operations before leaving Earth.
Space politics
Back in the days before private companies were allowed to send rockets into space, international agreements were signed that set out who could do what outside the Earth's atmosphere. Under the United Nations Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies, for instance, states agreed to explore space for the benefit of all humankind, not place weapons of mass destruction on celestial bodies and avoid harmful contamination.

That was back in 1967, four years before Elon Musk was born. With the emergence of ambitious private space companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin and others, though, who's allowed to do what in the solar system is less clear. It's good news for companies like SpaceX - at least in the short term. But this uncertainty is eventually going to crystallize into enforceable space policies, laws and regulations that apply to everyone. And when it does, Musk needs to make sure he's not left out in the cold.

This is of course policy, not politics. But there are powerful players in the global space policy arena. If they're rubbed the wrong way, it'll be politics that determines how resulting policies affect SpaceX.
Climate change
Perhaps the biggest danger is that Musk's vision of colonizing Mars looks too much like a disposable Earth philosophy - we've messed up this planet, so time to move on to the next. Of course, this idea may not factor into Musk's motivation, but in the world of climate change mitigation and adaptation, perceptions matter. The optics of moving to a new planet to escape the mess we've made here is not a scenario that's likely to win too many friends amongst those trying to ensure Earth remains habitable. And these factions wield considerable social and economic power - enough to cause problems for SpaceX if they decide to mobilize over this.

There is another risk here too, thanks to a proposed terrestrial use of SpaceX's BFR as a hyperfast transport between cities on Earth. Musk has recently titillated tech watchers with plans to use commercial rocket flights to make any city on Earth less than an hour's travel from any other. This is part of a larger plan to make the BFR profitable, and help cover the costs of planetary exploration. It's a crazy idea - that just might work. But what about the environmental impact?

Even though the BFR will spew out tons of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, the impacts may not be much greater than current global air travel (depending how many flights end up happening). And there's always the dream of creating the fuel - methane and oxygen - using solar power and atmospheric gases. The BFR could even conceivably be carbon-neutral one day.

But at a time when humanity should be doing everything in our power to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, the optics aren't great. And this could well lead to a damaging backlash before rocket-commuting even gets off the ground.
Inspiring - or infuriating?
Sixty years ago, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite - and changed the world. It was the dawn of the space age, forcing nations to rethink their technical education programs and inspiring a generation of scientists and engineers.

We may well be standing at a similar technological tipping point as researchers develop the vision and technologies that could launch humanity into the solar system. But for this to be a new generation's Sputnik moment, we'll need to be smart in navigating the many social and political hurdles between where we are now and where we could be.

These nontechnical hurdles come down to whether society writ large grants SpaceX and Elon Musk the freedom to boldly go where no one has gone before. It's tempting to think of planetary entrepreneurialism as simply getting the technology right and finding a way to pay for it. But if enough people feel SpaceX is threatening what they value (such as the environment - here or there), or disadvantaging them in some way (for example, by allowing rich people to move to another planet and abandoning the rest of us here), they'll make life difficult for the company.

This is where Musk and SpaceX need to be as socially adept as they are technically talented. Discounting these hidden hurdles could spell disaster for Elon Musk's Mars in the long run. Engaging with them up front could lead to the first people living and thriving on another planet in my lifetime.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Provided by: The Conversation

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Elon Musk's Mars plan overlooks some big nontechnical hurdles

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Elon Musk has a plan, and it's about as audacious as they come. Not content with living on our pale blue dot, Musk and his company SpaceX want to colonize Mars, fast. They say they'll send a duo of supply ships to the red ...

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The initial costs for building the rocket are really high and Elon Musk only talks about the price to get to mars not the cost to live on there.

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On Tuesday, tech entrepreneur Elon Musk told the world he has a plan to help humanity establish a colony on the planet Mars. But he delivered a sobering fact to the audience at the 67th annual International Astronautical Congress in Mexico: "Right now, you cannot go to Mars for infinite money."

With the right organisation and traditional methods, he added, you could hypothetically do it for $10 billion per ticket - an absolute best case scenario with current technology. But who wants to pay for that?

Instead, Musk wants his SpaceX firm to develop a new, reusable rocket system that can transport 100 people at a time. That, along with some important technical achievements, would help bring the cost down - ideally to as little as $200,000, or the price of a median home in the United States. Refuelling the ship in orbit around Earth before it heads off to its distant destination would, he explained, be one way of lowering expenses.

Although attractions would make the trip "really fun", there is a high chance of fatality

Noticeably absent from Musk's presentation, however, was confirmation that any big backer was ready to stump up the funding to make this dream a reality. Instead, Musk was selling the vision in the hope that a mix of public and private investors would get behind it, he explained.

But he was also happy to admit that there would be human risks involved, too. Although attractions like the on-board restaurant would make the trip "like, really fun", there is a high chance of fatality. "Are you prepared to die?" asked Musk. "If that's OK, then you're a candidate for going."

Calculating whether plans to colonise Mars are economically feasible is no easy task, but one person who has tried is Sydney Do, a researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He recently co-authored a detailed review of a different scheme - Mars One - which hopes to establish a Mars colony by 2024. Largely because of the ballooning costs involved in maintaining a human presence on the Red Planet, Do found the plan in its current form "fundamentally unfeasible," he explains.

"It is expensive in terms of the need to supply them with spare parts, keep systems running that extract water and create gases for them to breathe," he says.

What did he think of Musk's project? It's certainly visionary, says Do, and he noted the huge technological barrier of trying to get 100 people into space at once. The most we've ever managed is eight, via the space shuttle. Plus, the spacecraft Musk hopes to fling Mars-ward is very heavy. Do points out that it has roughly the same mass as the International Space Station.

But his key criticism of Musk's presentation is that it only discussed the relative cost of getting someone to Mars - not the cost of sustaining them.

"A more accurate representation of the problem would be in addition to the cost per trip, how much is the cost per night to stay on Mars?" asks Do.

When asked about colonisation of the planet, and how that would actually work, Musk told an audience member that his company was focused primarily on transportation only. In other words, SpaceX is an airline. They don't do hotels.
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The astronomical cost of going to Mars - and staying there

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On Tuesday, tech entrepreneur Elon Musk told the world he has a plan to help humanity establish a colony on the planet Mars. But he delivered a sobering fact to the audience at the 67th annual International Astronautical Congress in Mexico: "Right now, you cannot go to Mars for infinite money."

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This article talks about how SpaceX has already done a lot for space technology and while they aren't 100% there for their ideas, they can definitely be modified so that the technology will be what it needs to be to complete this mission. Also, there was a lot of talk about SpaceX having their ideas for getting there somewhat solid, but they don't have much of a plan for once they get their.

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On Tuesday (Sept. 27), billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk outlined plans to get hundreds of people to Mars. But are those plans really feasible?

This simulated image provides a look inside the SpaceX Interplanetary Transport System for sending humans to Mars.

Credit: SpaceX

Musk, who is founder and CEO of the private spaceflight company SpaceX, outlined a plan to build spacecraft that could each transport on the order of 100 people to the Red Planet. The plan would also include a giant new SpaceX rocket, spacecraft and support systems to help get those people to Mars (or destinations beyond). The even-longer-term goal that tops off Musk's vision is for humans alter Mars' atmosphere and environment to make the planet hospitable to life.

The plan is ambitious in nearly every way, from the technology Musk presented to the time line on which he hopes to accomplish these goals, not to mention the funding that will be required. Even so, the experts we talked to said it doesn't seem impossible, or even unachievable.[ Images: SpaceX's Interplanetary Transport for Mars Colonization]

"There's no technical obstacle to the plan being executable," space policy expert John Logsdon told Space.com. "SpaceX has good engineers. They don't have to really invent much."

Right now, SpaceX is flying nonhuman payloads for NASA and other customers, using the company's Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon space capsule (both built entirely in house). SpaceX is scheduled to start flying astronauts to the International Space Station for NASA as early as 2017. The company is also working on a larger rocket, called the Falcon Heavy, and representatives for SpaceX have said they would like to use the rocket to send one of the company's Dragon spacecraft to Mars as early as 2018.

The Falcon 9 has a reusable first-stage booster, which, instead of falling into the ocean and being scrapped after a launch, uses a set of thrusters to reorient itself, and three of its engines to lower itself down onto a landing pad. SpaceX has demonstrated a series of successful booster landings, although the company has not yet reused any of those landed boosters. That landing technology would likely be used to lower spacecraft onto the surface of Mars.

A simulated view of the SpaceX Interplanetary Transport System traveling to Mars, using solar panels to gather energy.

Credit: SpaceX

Logsdon said he thinks the main obstacles to SpaceX's Mars plans are money and time.

"The plan he is proposing on the timescale he is proposing seem to me to on the edge of fantasy," Logsdon said. He noted that Musk is known for setting ambitious goals on tight time lines, saying, "That's just Elon. That's his style." [ SpaceX's Mars Colony Plan: By the Numbers]

In addition, Logsdon said that while Musk's plan seemed to explain how humans would get to Mars, there was a significant gap in planning as to how those spacefarers would establish a colony on the Red Planet. Technologies and procedures for surviving on the surface of Mars are, at best, still in the early planning stages. Supporting such a huge influx of people will require food sources, an economic system and energy supplies, which Musk did not explain, Logsdon said.

"He got a little hand-wavy there," Logsdon said.

Because of the huge amount of funding a plan like this will require, SpaceX can't do it alone, Logsdon said. They'll need significant sources of funding, and NASA will likely be one of those sources, he said. As a result, it's very possible that NASA's plans to send humans to Mars will converge with SpaceX's plans, Logsdon added.

Some people are already breaking down the technical specifics of Musk's plan. Those experts include Robert Zubrin, leader of the space advocacy organization the Mars Society.

"In his talk today, Musk presented a number of interesting and very useful ideas," Zubrin wrote on the society's website. "I don't think they are practical in the form he presented them, but with a little modification, they could be made practical and very powerful."

Ahead of Musk's talk on Tuesday, SpaceX representatives announced that the company is working on a rocket engine that would run on methane/oxygen propellant, which the company determined was a more readily available fuel on Mars.

"He's right on the mark about using methane/oxygen propellant, which can be made on Mars, about making the spacecraft reusable and refillable on orbit," Zubrin wrote. However, Zubrin criticized Musk's plan to send one large propulsion system all the way to Mars, instead suggesting a system that would send the spacecraft toward Mars, but remain in orbit around the Earth.

"Musk's mega-Mars plans are welcome news," Leonard David, author of "Mars: Our Future on the Red Planet" (National Geographic, Oct. 2016) and a longtime Space.com contributor, said in an email. "But it is clear that there's far more needed in terms of technological and financial detail before climbing onboard his dream machinery."

"There are a number of 'DUD' (doable under duress) factors that must be dealt with before a true settlement on Mars becomes realistic," David said. Examples of DUD factors are "the types of machinery and power levels needed to run equipment for transforming the abundant resources on Mars into usable, life-supporting and sustaining supplies," he said.

Elon Musk, founder and CEO of SpaceX, outlined the company's plans to colonize Mars, speaking at the International Astronautical Congress meeting in Guadalajara, Mexico, on Sept. 27, 2016. Image taken from a SpaceX webcast of the event.

The experts we talked to also agreed that Musk has certainly managed to inspire many people, both in the industry and in the general public, about space exploration. Logsdon said the atmosphere in the room during Musk's talk was "like a rock concert."

"His extraordinary vision and passion is tugging at the adventuresome spirit of humankind, at least those who hunger to be part of a plan that assures our species becomes multiplanetary," David said. He later added that "Musk has served notice that building the bridge between the third and fourth planets in our solar system is an attainable and realizable goal."

Chris Carberry, executive director and co-founder of Explore Mars (a nonprofit created to advance the goal of sending humans to Mars within the next two decades), told David via email that "this announcement is likely to grow enthusiasm for humans on Mars tremendously.

"I think it is important, however, for SpaceX to articulate in more detail - over the next few months - their funding mechanism and how they will overcome the many technical and physiological challenges," Carberry said.

Follow Calla Cofield @callacofield. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

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Feasible or Fantasy? SpaceX's Mars Plan Draws Expert Reactions

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On Tuesday (Sept. 27), billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk outlined plans to get hundreds of people to Mars. But are those plans really feasible? Musk, who is founder and CEO of the private spaceflight company SpaceX, outlined a plan to build spacecraft that could each transport on the order of 100 people to the Red Planet.

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This article talks specifically about the rocket they will use for Interplanetary Transport, the BFR. It is a revised design that will cut back on cost greatly and will be, overall, a more useful rocket.

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"Now we think we have a better way to do it," he said Friday.

The new rocket and spaceship would replace everything that SpaceX is currently launching or plans to launch in the near future. "That's really fundamental," Mr. Musk said.

The slimmed-down rocket would be nine meters, or about 30 feet, in diameter instead of the 12-meter behemoth he described last year. It would still be more powerful than the Saturn 5 rocket that took NASA astronauts to the moon. Mr. Musk called it B.F.R. (The "B" stands for "big"; the "R" is for "rocket.") The B.F.R. would be able to lift 150 metric tons to low-Earth orbit, Mr. Musk said.

For Mars colonists, the rocket would lift a spaceship with 40 cabins, and with two to three people per cabin, it would carry about 100 people per flight. After launching, the B.F.R. booster would return to the launching pad; the spaceship would continue to orbit, where it would refill its tanks of methane and oxygen propellant before embarking on the monthslong journey to Mars.

But with the smaller size, the B.F.R. would also be useful much closer to Earth, Mr. Musk said. He said it would be able to take over the launching duties of SpaceX's current Falcon 9 rocket, taking many satellites to orbit at once, as well as ferry cargo and astronauts to the International Space Station. A variation of the spaceship could be used to collect and dispose of relics of satellite and other debris cluttering low-Earth orbit, he said.

Because all parts of the rocket and the spaceship are to be fully reusable, the cost of operating them would be low.

Robert Zubrin, president of the Mars Society, a nonprofit organization that advocates human exploration and settlement of the planet, liked the changes that Mr. Musk has made. "This is a much more practical approach than he presented last year," Dr. Zubrin said. "It means he is serious."

The same spaceship could also land on the moon. "It's 2017," Mr. Musk said. "We should have a lunar base by now."

Even on Earth, the rockets, traveling at up to 18,000 miles per hour, could make long-distance trips short - New York to Shanghai in 39 minutes, for example. Any two points on Earth would be less than an hour apart, Mr. Musk said.

After the presentation, Mr. Musk took to Instagram to elaborate on the price of those round-the-world rocket flights: "Cost per seat should be about the same as full fare economy in an aircraft. Forgot to mention that."

Mr. Musk maintained a highly optimistic schedule for his Mars dreams. He said the company had already started work to build pieces of the new rocket.

A cargo mission, without any passengers, could launch as early as 2022. "That's not a typo, although it is aspirational," he said. "Five years feels like a long time to me."

Two years later, the next time that Mars and Earth would swing by each other, SpaceX would launch four B.F.R.s to Mars - two carrying cargo, two carrying people.

In the lead-up to Mr. Musk's talk on Friday, the main entrance to the Adelaide Convention Center was closed and locked, with a swell of people outside waiting to get in.

"He's such an iconic character," said Paris Michaels, the chief executive of Air@Wave Communications in Sydney, who attended the congress. "I planned the day around making this event. I'm taking a later flight home, even though I'm averaging two hours' sleep this week."

SpaceX is not the only company with proposals for the Red Planet. A few hours before Mr. Musk's talk on Friday, Lockheed Martin provided an update of its own Mars mission vision, called Mars Base Camp. Compared with Mr. Musk's ambitions, the Lockheed Martin plan seems quaint and slow. It would not head to Mars until 2028, it would take only six astronauts, and the first trip would not even land on Mars but instead circle the planet for a year before returning to Earth.

From Mars orbit, astronauts could control robotic explorers like rovers and flying drones.

Mars Base Camp is more of a suggestion to NASA of what the agency could do rather than a corporate strategy that Lockheed Martin would pursue by itself.

"This isn't Lockheed Martin's vision, and it's not the only vision of how to get to Mars, but we put it out here so that we can globally begin the dialogue," Robert Chambers, an engineer working on the Mars Base Camp concept, said during the presentation.

Unlike Mr. Musk's dreams, Mars Base Camp would not require unproven business plans or novel technologies far beyond what already exists or is already in development. "We know how to do this," Mr. Chambers said.

The spacecraft, which looks as one might expect a traditional NASA expeditionary mission to Mars to look, would incorporate both the Orion crew capsule that Lockheed Martin is building for NASA deep-space missions and the agency's plans to put a space station high above the moon. This week, the Russian space agency announced that it would like to collaborate with NASA on this lunar space station, called the Deep Space Gateway.

Lockheed Martin is one of six companies that NASA selected to develop a prototype of a habitat module that could be used for the Deep Space Gateway. Lockheed Martin officials said their vision for Mars Base Camp did not depend on their design's being selected.

The Mars Base Camp proposal would also fit within the NASA budget, Lockheed Martin officials said.

This year's update unveiled a reusable, hydrogen-fueled lander that would take astronauts to the Martian surface on a follow-up mission. Up to four astronauts could live on the Martian surface for two weeks at a time in the lander.

Reflecting the interest of many to return to the moon before going to Mars, Lockheed Martin officials said the lander could also be used to travel to different parts of the moon from the Deep Space Gateway.

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national aeronautics and space administration

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Elon Musk's Mars Vision: A One-Size-Fits-All Rocket. A Very Big One.

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"Now we think we have a better way to do it," he said Friday. The new rocket and spaceship would replace everything that SpaceX is currently launching or plans to launch in the near future. "That's really fundamental," Mr. Musk said.

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This article talks about the harmful effect of cosmic rays on astronauts. These rays can cause many different health complications, including damaging DNA and development of cancer. The article also mentions different ways that could decrease these risks so that travel to Mars could still be possible.

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Mission to Mars

NASA is dead-set on sending astronauts to Mars within the next 15 to 20 years. China has said it hopes to send people there between 2020 and 2030, and even Russia is floating plans to put boots on the red planet.

Meanwhile, SpaceX founder Elon Musk is trying to cut the cost of spaceflight enough to start establishing a permanent Martian colony of 1 million people as soon as possible.

But if a study of radiation exposure in mice has any bearing on humans, going to Mars may be much more dangerous than anyone expected.

The root problem is cosmic rays, as detailed in a May 2017 Nature studyand highlighted by a recent Business Insider video.

The Danger of Cosmic Rays

Cosmic rays are high-energy atomic and subatomic particles that get blasted out from exploding stars, black holes, and other powerful sources in space. The rays can damage DNA, increase the risk of cancer, lead to vision-impairing cataracts, cause nervous system damage, and give rise to blood circulation issues, among other health effects in astronauts.

Researchers know that astronauts receive much higher radiation exposure than those of us who remain on Earth, since the planet's atmosphere absorbs a lot of that harmful energy.

Earth's magnetic field also diverts and deflects a lot of space radiation, which helps protect astronauts on the International Space Station - which orbits just 250 miles above the planet.

On a trip to Mars, however, it's open season for cosmic rays. In addition, the planet lost its magnetic field billions of years ago, which will expose the first Mars explorers to extra radiation.

Health scientist Frank Cucinotta and his colleague Eliedonna Cacao at the University of Nevada Las Vegas researched this problem by reexamining the results of four previous studies of tumors in mice.

In addition of looking for the effects of a cosmic ray's direct hit to cells, which could coax them to develop into cancer, the researchers also looked at how secondary or "non-targeted effects" might play a role.

What they found is a risk of cancer in deep space (at least for mice) that's about two times higher than previous estimates.

Why Deep-Space Travel May Be More Dangerous Than Expected

The researchers think this elevated cancer risk comes down to how damaged DNA spreads throughout the body.

When a cell is struck by a cosmic ray, it doesn't simply keep the change to itself. It can give off chemical signals to other cells, which might trigger nearby healthy cells to also mutate into cancer.

Previous models hadn't really accounted for this domino effect. Even more worrisome, the type of radiation responsible for causing the effect was "only modestly decreased by radiation shielding," Cucinotta and Cacao wrote in their study.

Human exploration of Mars need not stop before it starts, though.

Space agencies and private companies are actively working to mitigate space radiation. An Israeli startup is developing a body vest designed to more fully absorb radiation, for example, and one NASA scientist recently pitched the idea of deploying a satellite that'd serve as an artificial magnetic shield to divert harmful radiation around Mars.

And as the researchers noted in their study, "significant differences" exist between mouse-model cancer rates and those actually seen in people. "These differences could limit the applicability of the predictions described in this paper," they wrote.

But the scientists add that this knowledge gap is precisely why future deep-space explorers and their respective agencies should exercise caution.

"[S]tudies ... are urgently needed prior to long-term space missions outside the protection of the Earth's geomagnetic sphere," they said.

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Before we can send humans to Mars, we need to address this major health risk

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NASA is dead-set on sending astronauts to Mars within the next 15 to 20 years. China has said it hopes to send people there between 2020 and 2030, and even Russia is floating plans to put boots on the red planet.

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This is an academic study on the Mars One project. The study evaluates on how well the ideas presented will work and if they can keep on schedule.

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An independent assessment of the technical feasibility of the Mars One mission plan - Updated analysis - ScienceDirect

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In recent years, the Mars One program has gained significant publicity for its plans to colonize the red planet. Beginning in 2025, the program plans to land four people on Mars every 26 months via a series of one-way missions, using exclusively existing technology.

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This article talks about Musk's aspirations not only for Mars, but for Earth as well. The vast costs to go to Mars are duly noted, and are compared to the newer, faster, still affordable intercontinental transit that they plan to implement on Earth. They extrapolate that if they can make new, high tech advances affordable on Earth they can do so on Mars as well.
[http://www.gulf-times.com/story/565727/Elon-Musk-s-new-vision-Anywhere-on-Earth-under-one] (link is having trouble displaying)

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Bloomberg/San Francisco/Sydney

Entrepreneur Elon Musk (pictured), who has long dreamed of creating a human colony on Mars, is planning to build a new rocket ship code named "BFR" capable of travelling anywhere on Earth in under an hour.
If the concept becomes reality, Musk said a journey from New York to Shanghai can be done in about 30 minutes. The surprise announcement means that his Space Exploration Technologies Corp, which has already disrupted the aerospace industry with reusable launches, plans to ferry humans not just to distant planets but across this one as well, setting up a potentially competitive challenge to the commercial airline industry.
"If we are going to places like Mars, why not Earth?" Musk said on Friday at the 68th International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide, Australia. Toward the end of Musk's highly technical presentation, animation played on a big screen behind him, showing scores of people getting on a high-speed ferry in New York, then boarding the BFR on a platform in the water. The spaceship then travels to Shanghai in roughly half an hour.
"Fly to most places on Earth in under 30 mins and anywhere in under 60," Musk wrote in an Instagram post after he'd left the stage without taking questions. "Cost per seat should be about the same as full fare economy in an aircraft. Forgot to mention that."
With many commercial satellite operators as customers, the revenue from those contracts will help fund the development of the BFR, which would be capable of carrying satellites to orbit, crew and cargo to the International Space Station, and complete missions to the Moon and Mars, said Musk. He said the BFR would contain 40 cabins capable of ferrying roughly 100 people at a time.
Musk, 46, has a net worth of roughly $21bn and has said in the past he'd used his own personal assets to help fund his vision. He first detailed his Mars plans in a talk at the IAC in Guadalajara, Mexico, a year ago and later published a paper about it, generating enormous excitement but raising concerns it included few details on financing. Musk promised his Twitter followers this summer that his updated Mars plan would address the lack of payment details - which he called "the most fundamental flaw" in his first take.
Previously, Musk had talked about sending an unmanned "Red Dragon" spacecraft to Mars in 2018. That plan, as well as the spacecraft, has been shelved. The new plan calls for the first BFR to land on Mars in 2022, followed by crewed missions in 2024.
Musk, who's also CEO of electric-car maker Tesla Inc, founded SpaceX in 2002 with the ultimate goal of enabling people to live on other planets. The closely-held space exploration company currently flies the Falcon 9 rocket for customers that include NASA, commercial satellite operators and the US military. The Hawthorne, California-based company also has plans to launch its own satellite network.
The cost of a Falcon 9 launch is roughly $62mn, according to SpaceX's website, with modest discounts available for contractually committed, multi-launch purchases. SpaceX's rockets are designed for reuse, with rocket reusability now seen as key to making space travel affordable. SpaceX celebrated its first launch using a previously flown booster in March and regularly recovers the rocket's first stage on land or on "drone ships" at sea.
SpaceX has completed 13 launches so far this year and has several missions on its manifest, including back-to-back launches slated for October 7th and October 9th. Musk said the first test flight of Falcon Heavy, a far more powerful rocket capable of heavy payloads and sending paying space tourists on a flight around the moon, will occur "hopefully towards the end of the year," but that date has already slipped several times.
It appears that the BFR, which is in development, would ultimately replace the Falcon 9, the Falcon Heavy and the Dragon spacecraft, which currently ferries supplies to the International Space Station.
Mars is no longer the stuff of science fiction. Mars exploration got an enormous boost in August 2012, when NASA's Curiosity Rover landed on the Red Planet. The robotic vehicle continues to transmit breathtaking, high-resolution photographs of the dune-and butte-filled landscape to the delight of scientists and Curiosity's 3.8mn Twitter followers.
Still, human colonization of Mars won't be easy. Getting there will take several months, with unknown risks to the human body and psyche. Even if space explorers survive the 155mn-mile journey and subsequent first-ever manned landing, they would need to get to work immediately to create a habitable atmosphere, find water and produce the fuel needed to propel the rocket ship homeward. And Musk is famous, in part, for his aspirational timelines.
"SpaceX is in the business of making the impossible possible," said Phil Larson, a former space policy adviser to President Barack Obama who worked for SpaceX and is now at the University of Colorado-Boulder. "Using the same principles, and diverse funding approach, that have taken them from their first launch 9 years ago to where they are today, it makes this seem within the realm of possibility."

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Elon Musk's new vision: Anywhere on Earth under one hour on economy fare

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Bloomberg/San Francisco/Sydney Entrepreneur Elon Musk (pictured), who has long dreamed of creating a human colony on Mars, is planning to build a new rocket ship code named "BFR" capable of travelling anywhere on Earth in under an hour. If the concept becomes reality, Musk said a journey from New York to Shanghai can be done in about 30 minutes.

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This article is about research done by Sydney Do who is a aerospace engineer. His research has shown some flaws in the current plans for Mars One

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How feasible is the Mars One plan?

Currently, it's not. One of the biggest claims made by the Mars One team is that absolutely no new technology needs to be developed for the success of their mission, which is setting up a colony on Mars. We found that there are several cases for systems like the environmental control and life support where that's just not true.

Even if some of these technologies did exist, we discovered that over time, the Mars One mission would become exceedingly expensive and unsustainable. That's because the mission's plan relies on a steady resupply stream bringing replacements like filters, pumps, motors for when something inevitably breaks. As the colony expands, you find that the sheer mass of the spare parts you're transporting explodes and becomes a bigger and bigger part of what you send to Mars each time you launch.

And you need all of these spare parts. Unlike the International Space Station, you can't have your crew eject (and be back on the ground in a few hours) if something critical is damaged.

We didn't even analyze a couple of vital elements of the mission-like the communication, power, and landing systems-which are likely to also require new technological advancements.

Your study revealed Mars One's life support setup would actually produce dangerous levels of oxygen. What's up with that?

Creating a breathable atmosphere on Mars is probably one of the easier problems to solve. But the issue we found in our study is that to fulfill the caloric requirements of the colonists, the Mars One team needs to grow at least four times the amount of plants they had planned. Growing this amount of crops in the same [area where the crew lives and works] would result in excessive levels of oxygen that would pose a fire risk.

"The Mars One team needs to grow at least four times the amount of plants they had planned."

Now, there are a couple of ways you might get around this issue. For example, on Earth, we have technologies that selectively remove oxygen from an atmosphere. These have never been used in spaceflight applications. Or, you could plan to separate where your colonists live from where you grow your food. But what was really surprising is that, as far as we could find, this entire issue of needing to remove oxygen has never been mentioned in any of the Mars One plans.

You also argue that the mission's cost is severely underestimated.

A lot of this goes back to the spare parts and resupply issue. By the launch of the fifth crew, spare parts alone would make up 62 percent of your entire resupply requirement.

Although Mars One claims that conducting a one-way mission is cheaper than conducting a return mission (which sounds right, because you don't need to send your return vehicle with you), this is really far from the truth. Over time, these lifecycle costs offset any savings you'd have in the first place.

Another problem is that much of the Mars One plan-and this is based on unofficial sources and the size of the equipment they plan to bring-is focused on utilizing a five-meter diameter variant of the SpaceX Dragon capsule. But SpaceX's current Dragon capsule is only three and a half meters in diameter, and there's never been any type of announcement that SpaceX plans to build a scaled-up version. For the sake of our study, we were generous and just assumed that we could use a hypothetical five-meter diameter variant, but a smaller capsule would require more rockets.

How did the Mars One plan get so unrealistic?

Thats a tough question. It looks a lot like, across the board, the Mars One team seemed to use the most optimistic numbers possible. They've also done a lot of 1-to-1 mapping of their specific mission needs to currently available technologies, and that leads to unrealistic expectations.

When you start to integrate multiple technologies into a single system, you get emergent behaviors that are difficult to predict. Many of these technologies may work on Earth, but there's no guarantee we wouldn't find issues in the Mars environment, and that could be a deadly mistake.

Something related, which was somewhat unexpected, is how the Mars One team has responded to our study. We made a lot of a lot of design recommendations, and kind of expected they'd be welcoming of suggestions to help develop a roadmap to feasibility. But instead there's been a lot of defensiveness and ad homonym attacks.

So should Mars be off the table for now?

I want to be clear: We are not saying we should not go to Mars. In fact, the entire reason we did this study was to adjust the aims and preparation of a Mars manned mission.

"There's a great danger in getting complacent about your ability to keep humans alive in space."

But every manned space mission in history has been done through incremental steps, to minimize the risks of which there are many, and to uncover the unknown unknowns that come with any new territory. Planning a one-way mission before we've quantified the risks, and before we've recognized the challenges - that's just not an incremental step.

If we look at the tragedies of manned spaceflight - like the Apollo 1 fire, or Columbia and Challenger accidents - there's a great danger in getting complacent about your ability to keep humans alive in space. So this idea, that everything is easy because it's been done before, that's an incredibly dangerous mindset when planning a Mars mission.

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Is a One-Way Trip to Mars Doomed to Fail?

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Sydney Do is an aerospace engineer at MIT who specializes in space habitation. He and his colleagues just published new research detailing the many flaws and oversights in the current plans for Mars Onethe non-profit devoted to settling a permanent

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This article outlines some of the various challenges involved in getting humans to Mars like supplies and astronaut safety. The author also went over some technologies that could be leveraged to solve these issues.

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In August 1998, I attended the founding convention of the Mars Society. During that first gathering at the University of Colorado, society founder and President Robert Zubrin waxed poetic about the urgent need to send humans to Mars. Seven hundred attendees signed the group's founding manifesto, which contended that it was necessary to journey to Mars so that we could extend scientific knowledge, advance human civilization and carry forward "as much of the best of [human] heritage as possible" while "leaving the worst behind." Conference speakers talked about terraforming the red planet and establishing a new society that would exploit the planet's resources to sustain human life.

At the time, the ideas struck me as slightly loopy. But now, nearly 20 years later, Zubrin's mad dream seems tantalizingly achievable. In 2014, a working group of more than 60 experts from government, industry and academia released a joint statement concluding that "a human mission to Mars is both feasible and affordable." The group also said that putting humans on Mars is "technologically feasible by the 2030s."

Plans are already taking shape with NASA's program to put humans on Mars - the target date is sometime in the 2030s. Although other agencies, including the Russian Institute for Biomedical Problems and the European Space Agency, are also studying the feasibility of a human Mars mission, NASA currently has the most advanced Mars program and remains the only group to have successfully landed a craft on the planet. (Several countries, including China, India, Japan and the United Arab Emirates, have sent or will send robotic missions to Mars by 2024.) The private companies SpaceX and Blue Origin are also aiming to send humans to the red planet, but these private plans remain mostly in the early stages. Some major challenges remain, however, before any of these programs can deliver people to Mars.

Challenge: Getting there

The first problem is simply getting off the ground. People venturing to Mars will require fuel and other supplies to last more than two years, and that means their spacecraft will be larger and heavier than anything we've ever sent into space. Bigger spacecraft require much bigger launch vehicles, said Robert Braun, a former NASA researcher who's now dean of engineering and applied science at the University of Colorado (no matter what, he won't be going to Mars himself - in his wedding vows, he pledged to his wife that he would stay on Earth).

To tackle the liftoff problem, NASA is developing the Space Launch System, dubbed the " biggest, most capable rocket ever built" to launch astronauts to Mars and other destinations beyond Earth's orbit. In its first iteration, the rocket will have 8.8 million pounds of thrust (more than 31 times the total thrust of a 747 jet) and the capability to launch 77 tons of cargo into orbit. (For comparison, the space shuttle could launch about 26 tons.) The second-generation system is even more powerful and is designed to blast 143 tons of payload into space. If all goes as planned, the first-generation rocket will undergo its first test launch in 2018 from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

While NASA works on SLS, Elon Musk's company SpaceX is developing its own Interplanetary Transport System consisting of a large rocket booster and spaceship combo, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has gotten into the space business, too - his company Blue Origin is working on a rocket that could send astronauts into deep space.

Once the spaceship leaves the ground, you need a rapid and fuel-efficient way to propel it to Mars. The trip takes at least six months each way, and because of planetary alignments, you're looking at a multiyear mission, said Walter Engelund of NASA's Langley Research Center. Even with technological advances, engineers can squeeze only so much power from traditional chemical propulsion fuels.

Nuclear electric power is another option. It has a very high specific impulse (a measure of how efficiently fuel is used to produce thrust), which "means that it has very good gas mileage," said Stephen Jurczyk, the associate administrator of NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate. "The downside is that it's very low thrust." A craft propelled this way would take longer to get to Mars, but it would travel more efficiently, so this type of system could be a good way to send supplies to the planet in advance of the astronauts' arrival, he said. Given the dangers of spaceflight (more on that below), engineers want to limit the transit time for people. In the meantime, researchers are working on electric propulsion thrusters that could produce greater speeds and potentially shorten the trip.

Challenge: Supplying the mission

Forget the extra baggage fee, if you're heading to Mars; you won't have the luxury of hauling along much stuff. Storage space and weight will be at a premium, and there's only so much skimping you can do when it comes to fuel, food, water and other vital supplies.

Sending some supplies in advance is an obvious solution, but if we expect people to stay on Mars for any length of time, we'll have to become adept at " in situ resource utilization " - NASA's term for living off the land.

There's water lurking below the Martian soil, but it contains perchlorate (a salt that's dangerous to humans), so it would have to be mined and purified before use. Materials from the planet's surface might be usable for crew housing. Presumably this sort of resource extraction would begin with robotics before any people arrived, Braun said. The next logical step would be establishing a system for growing food. The first people sent to Mars would need to arrive with ample food supplies, but agriculture of some sort or another would probably be taking place by the time the second or third crew arrived, Braun said. Martian farming faces its own set of difficulties. The planet's soil does contain the nutrients plants need to grow, but photosynthesis could be a challenge, since Mars gets only about half as much sunlight as Earth and the planet's frequent dust storms could further diminish the amount of light reaching the ground.

Some proposed plans are purposely one-way, leaving people there without a return trip. If Martian visitors want to return to Earth, they'll need fuel. Launching from Mars would be easier than leaving Earth, because in addition to its thin atmosphere, the planet has about one-10th the mass of Earth, which means less gravity to overcome. But still, a return trip requires fuel, and fuel is heavy, and if you have to haul it to Mars from Earth, that means you'll have a lot less room for other supplies. One likely solution would involve sending robots to Mars first so that they could take carbon dioxide from the planet's atmosphere to extract oxygen and methane that could be turned into fuel for the trip home. "If you don't have to bring all the return fuel with you, you can save a lot of money," Engelund said.

Challenge: Keeping astronauts safe

Living in space inflicts a variety of insults on the human body. First, there's the lack of gravity, which weakens bones and causes muscles to atrophy. Experience with the International Space Station has shown that exercise can help with, though not entirely solve, these problems.

A more worrisome issue is radiation, which could cause cancer, acute radiation sickness or even cognitive problems. While astronauts on the International Space Station are exposed to more radiation than they'd get on the Earth's surface, they're still protected from deep space radiation by the Earth's magnetic field, Braun said. After space travelers pass the Van Allen Belts, collections of charged particles that protect the Earth from the most damaging incoming radiation and reach 400 to 36,000 miles above the Earth's surface, they'll have to mitigate deep cosmic radiation, too.

NASA is working on the problem by developing advanced materials to deflect space radiation. "The goal is to minimize mass while maximizing the protective effects," Engelund said. At Brookhaven National Labs in New York, researchers are testing candidate materials such as plastics and metallic shielding. But shields may not entirely solve the problem, because the materials in them have a tendency to emit secondary radiation (radiation released when a substance absorbs outside radiation), Jurczyk said.

Space travelers will continue to require radiation protection when they arrive on Mars, because unlike Earth, Mars does not have a global magnetic field to shield against radiation blasting it from space. Probably the easiest solution here, Engelund said, would be for astronauts to live underground or coat housing structures with protective materials.

Challenge: Entry, descent and landing

Before you buy your SpaceX ticket to Mars ( Musk aspires to get the price down to about $200,000), consider this sobering statistic: In the history of Mars missions, only eight craft have landed successfully.

Just reaching Mars is only the start - then you have the difficult task of landing. Vessels returning to Earth use friction created when entering the planet's thick atmosphere to slow down, but the Mars atmosphere is very thin, so it can't create the drag needed to reduce a space vehicle's speed in preparation for landing.

One promising solution is supersonic retro propulsion, which essentially uses rockets firing in the direction opposite of the spacecraft's travel to counter its forward motion.

But slowing down isn't enough; you also have to stick the landing. "We know how to land small robotic payloads on the Mars surface - things the size of a child's toy or, in the case of the Curiosity rover, a small car," Braun said. But landing a spaceship will be more like landing a two-story house next to another two-story house that's already there, Braun said. Not only do you need to nail the touchdown, you need to get the position just right.

"Landing with precision - and by that I mean within a few kilometers - is a big challenge," Engelund said. "On Earth, we have this great thing called GPS, which we can use to steer and navigate things with fairly high precision." Mars doesn't have that global positioning system, so astronauts would have to rely on terrain maps and other forms of navigation. Touching down in the right spot is crucial to ensure that any supplies sent in advance are within reach - and it's also important for avoiding hazards like cliffs and other potentially dangerous features.

Challenge: Sustained political will

Give NASA's Mars program steady funding for a few decades, and it's almost certain to solve the remaining technical barriers to putting humans on Mars, Engelund said. But therein lies the biggest barrier in the U.S.: NASA and the space program are politically charged topics. "Almost without exception, whenever a new administration comes in, we get a change in priorities," Engelund said. Sending humans to Mars will require sustained support, and that means politicians who are willing to fund NASA and prioritize its Mars program.

Although private companies have entered the race to Mars, a successful journey will almost certainly rely on cooperation or technology from NASA. If NASA's Mars program is going to have any chance of proceeding on its planned timeline, it will need ongoing support that outlasts multiple administrations and elections.

It's too soon to know what the new administration will hold for the Mars program. President Donald Trump has, at least once, pledged not to cut space funding, but he also said at a town hall rally in New Hampshire in August that he wants to "rebuild our infrastructure" before sending people to Mars.

Sending people to Mars will take a lot of infrastructure too, and whether Robert Zubrin's dream is fulfilled in his lifetime (he's 64) will largely depend on money and politics.

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All We Really Need To Get To Mars Is A Boatload Of Cash

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In August 1998, I attended the founding convention of the Mars Society. During that first gathering at the University of Colorado, society founder and President Robert Zubrin waxed poetic about the urgent need to send humans to Mars.

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If humans are to live on Mars, they will need water for drinking as well as utility. Mars may be able to provide this in the form of ice buried under the surface, but it is difficult for scientists to know how much ice there is

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One of the most important things in this article is NASA's Mars plan. It also talks about possible solutions to technical issues; such as studying human health and wellness in space for long periods of time, and printing 3D parts.

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NASA Releases Plan Outlining Next Steps in the Journey to Mars

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NASA's Journey to Mars: Pioneering Next Steps in Space Exploration. This report provides an update on NASA's strategy for human deep space exploration that will enable our journey to Mars

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This scholarly research paper examines the "economic viability of colonizing Mars". It shows how Mars is unique in being the only planet in our solar system with enough resources to support a population of "sufficient size" to create a human colony, how Mars may be economically profitable through its positional advantage in extraction missions of nearby orbitting objects, and what the potential is for interplanetary transportation systems. It also investigates the reasons for humans emigrating to Mars, and how the likely reasons will probably mirror those of the Europeans coming to the Americas.

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The Economic Viability of Mars Colonization

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The economic viability of colonizing Mars is examined. It is shown, that of all bodies in the solar system other than Earth, Mars is unique in that it has the resources required to support a population of sufficient size to create locally a new branch of human civilization.

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This article talks about the psychological issues involving the trip to Mars. It brings up good points about how this trip could negatively impact the brain.

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We all have them-a sibling who "borrows" your clothes without returning them, a co-worker who never puts your stapler back where she found it, a spouse who refuses to pick up his socks.
Now imagine being stuck with such a person in a room the size of an RV for 17 months. If the Inspiration Mars Foundation is successful in its bid to launch a woman and a man to fly by the red planet in 2018, privacy is one of many psychological issues crew members will have to deal with.

The foundation, led by space tourist Dennis Tito, formally announced its plan on Wednesday at a Washington, D.C., press conference. (Related: "Manned Mars Mission Announced by Dennis Tito Group.")

The all-American crew would consist of two people past childbearing age due to the radiation doses they would be exposed to by using current equipment. Technological constraints also dictate the number of people that could go on this mission, said Jane Poynter.

Poynter was one of the first Biosphere 2 crew members and is a co-founder of Paragon Space Development Corporation, which is developing the life-support system for the foundation's Mars mission. The foundation is also in talks with the National Geographic Society about a potential partnership on the mission.

While humans have a long history of setting off into the unknown on our own planet and in the immediate vicinity, space travel beyond low-Earth orbit and the moon-and what it means for the mental well-being of human crews-is a new frontier. ( Read about risk takers in National Geographic magazine.)

"I think these will be bigger challenges than technology challenges," said Jason Kring, a researcher at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida who studies how humans perform in extreme environments.

Feelings of isolation and boredom, the knowledge that Earth is so very far away, and long periods of confinement are some of the mental issues researchers worry about for crew members. ( Learn about humanity's history of space exploration.)

In Earth-orbiting missions, such as to the International Space Station (ISS), astronauts have real time communication with friends, family, and ground teams.

ISS inhabitants can receive visitors and crews can be resupplied with their favorite foods, said Nick Kanas, a psychiatrist and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). (Related: "Life aboard the International Space Station.")

"Now fast forward to Mars -you can't talk to anybody in real time," said Kanas, who has studied psychological issues in astronauts for NASA.

"If you have a fire you have to deal with it yourselves," he said. "You can't evacuate anyone if they develop issues ... You're really isolated."

Isolation was the hardest part of living in Biosphere 2, a self-contained habitat meant to simulate Earth's various environments in the Arizona desert, said Poynter.

"We weren't as prepared as we should have been for being isolated," she said. Some of Biosphere 2's crew members developed depression or mood swings, and psychologists were brought in to help those individuals cope.

But the members toughed out their two-year stints, Poynter said, adding that she will advocate for the Mars crew to get training in how to deal with psychological challenges.

Mission planners will also be talking to NASA and to people who have spent extended periods of time at the ISS about how to plan for such hardship, she said.

Embry-Riddle's Kring and UCSF's Kanas both questioned the wisdom of the proposed two-person Mars crew.

"I think two is a setup for problems," said Kanas. "You can get along with anybody for a month, but you're talking about a year and a half or longer, and it's different."

Kring said that if the teammates got upset with each other, there would be no one to help smooth things over or take up any slack workwise.

There have been instances in the Russian cosmonaut program in which crew members in space got mad at one another and didn't speak for months, he said.

Poynter added that there were team members in Biosphere 2 who didn't speak to each other for 18 months beyond what was essential to keep their habitat running. (Related: "Two Years Under Glass: The First Biosphere 2 Mission.")

Crew members would be able to communicate with people on Earth, but interactions between crews in space and teams on the ground can develop their own set of problems.

Kanas's research has shown that crews in space will sometimes displace negative feelings onto ground teams. That can result in crews feeling like no one on the ground cares about them, he said.

Russian investigators have found that teams in space might also withhold some information from ground personnel, giving support personnel on Earth an incomplete picture of what's happening on the spacecraft, Kanas noted in an article published in 2010 in the Journal of Cosmology.

But experts say that some psychological issues can be avoided or mitigated with proper crew selection and training.

David F. Dinges, a psychology researcher at the University of Pennsylvania Perlman School of Medicine, thinks a two-person crew could work, depending on the people involved.

"It sort of depends on which two people and the nature of the habitat and the nature of what they have to do," he said.

There's no hard-and-fast list of characteristics that make a good crew member, said UCSF's Kanas, who has helped NASA screen astronaut candidates.

In general, good crew members are those who enjoy both working alone on projects and socializing, Kanas said.

This is so crew members can go off and give themselves and their teammates a break from each other, but then come together for meals or to work out a problem.

"You don't want introverts and you don't want extroverts," Kanas said.

Embry-Riddle's Kring adds that crew members should also be comfortable with fluid situations and be able to deal with differences in how others live and work.

Having a sense of humor also helps. When a group of Kring's students entered a Utah facility meant to simulate living and working on Mars for two weeks, individuals with a sense of humor were able to keep the group laughing.

That helped to diffuse tensions that surfaced among a team that, even though they got along very well before they went inside, developed issues within days of starting their simulated mission, Kring said.

It would be ideal if the Inspiration Mars Foundation's two-person crew were an attached couple, said Paragon's Poynter: "It's immeasurably helpful to have someone who you know and who you trust."

That setup would also help address any concerns of a romantic relationship developing between male and female crew members.

Poynter said she would love to go to Mars with her husband, former Biosphere 2 crew member and Paragon co-founder Taber MacCallum. "When we were in the Biosphere, we would sit on the beach," she said, "[and] just imagine ourselves hurtling towards Mars or being on the surface of Mars."

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Psychological Challenges of a Manned Mission to Mars

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We all have them-a sibling who "borrows" your clothes without returning them, a co-worker who never puts your stapler back where she found it, a spouse who refuses to pick up his socks. Now imagine being stuck with such a person in a room the size of an RV for 17 months.

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Risks and Challenges - Mission - Mars One

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Mars One has developed a mission to establish a human settlement on Mars built entirely upon existing technology. While the integration of systems proven in prior missions does greatly improve the chance of success, it by no means eliminates the risk or challenge of such an incredible endeavor.

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This article talks about the current techniques used by NASA psychologists and psychiatrists to take care of astronauts' mental health during long missions at the ISS. It also discusses how these ideas might be somewhat modified for a Mars mission.

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Outer space is terrifying - not just on the body, but also on the mind. Extreme environments and situations can stretch people's minds to the brink of sanity, and outer space is no exception. Sure, astronauts are protected inside their multimillion-dollar spacecraft, but those confined little metallic boxes can make one feel isolated and trapped. And we're also making strides to put humans on other planets.

All that time in the deep dark void - probably not good for the noggin, right?

Thankfully, NASA's on it. Welcome to the world alternately called aerospace psychiatry and psychology - a field of medicine where one provides mental health support to aviation professionals.

Astronauts, in particular, have been the focus group for decades now. They're people who we typically think of as the best of the best, "who are otherwise quite healthy, but operate in an abnormal environment," says Gary Beven, NASA Flight Surgeon and Chief of Aerospace Psychiatry at NASA Johnson Space Center.

Although the U.S. beat Russia to the moon, it was the Russians who started aerospace psychology. Beven explains that during missions onboard the Salyut 6 (1977 - 1982) and Salyut 7 (1982 - 1991) space stations, Soviet cosmonauts began to experience noticeable signs of psychological distress (or physical problems with an underlying psychological cause) while in space.

This most likely had to do with the longer durations of these missions. Salyut 6 had the first six-month space mission, while Salyut 7 upped the ante with the first-ever eight-month mission. Each mission put two or three cosmonauts in a fairly tight quarters with one another. Several crew stints had to be terminated before completion.

The Russians were spurred into establishing their own space psychology program. "They brought in experts within the field of psychology to work full-time with the Russian space program," says Beven. "They were involved not only with cosmonaut selection, but also providing support and monitoring the psychological well-being of astronauts while they were in space."

Until fairly recently, NASA wasn't interested in long duration missions, so they had no need for psychologists or psychiatrists beyond the initial medical and mental health evaluation during the candidate selection process.

That changed in the mid 1990s, when the U.S. and Russia established the Shuttle-Mir Program to allow NASA to learn about Russia's experiences with long-duration space habitation. At that point, NASA brought in a group of psychologists and psychiatrists to develop a behavioral health and support group for the NASA astronauts that were staying aboard Russia's Mir space station.

"Life aboard Mir was very arduous and very difficult," says Beven. "Some of the (U.S.) astronauts even admitted they felt they had not been psychologically prepared for that type of a mission." Some did exceptionally well, like Shannon Lucid (who stayed on Mir for seven months in 1996), but others publicly acknowledged the difficulty of living in an orbital spacecraft for months at a time. Part of the feelings of psychological anxiety and depression that crept up were simply the result of isolation, difficulty communicating with Russian counterparts on the station, the lack of leisure activities on Mir.

With all that qualitative data and feedback, NASA refined the aerospace psychiatry system as it and the rest of the world began moving forward with the International Space Station. Today's aerospace psychiatry group supports astronauts from the time of training all the way through the end of the mission - and even beyond to assist with post-mission acclimation to life on the ground. "In some ways, we may be involved with astronauts all the way to the end of their career," says Beven. "We get to know them very well, and we also get to know their families very well."

Beven says the candidate selection process is probably the most important way to prepare astronauts for the mental rigors of space travel and life. The goal is to pick candidates who possess sound, sturdy minds. Beven and his team grade candidates on nine different "suitability proficiencies":

ability to perform under stressful conditions

self-regulation of one's emotions and mood

judgement and decision making

They also screen for any history of major mental disorders or disqualifying problems. For the most part, candidates come from occupations where good mental health and the aforementioned traits are already a necessity, sometimes in already extreme or stressful environments - such as fighter pilot living aboard an aircraft carrier, or a scientist who has done stints at research stations in Antarctica. When you're talking about picking 10 astronauts to train out of a final list of 60 people, you're really getting the most mentally and behaviorally qualified group, says Beven.

The vast majority of the aerospace psychiatry group's work, however, revolves around proactively working with active astronauts. Beven says there are a little over 40 active astronauts currently working at NASA, and each one is notified they'll be going up into space about two years prior to the mission launch.

Beven and his team start to work directly with the astronaut (and their spouse), and their work can be categorized into two parts. The first is behavioral medicine: evaluating astronauts' mental health at regular intervals before launch (the last meeting happening 60 days before launch) and training them to identify and deal with instances of psychological detriment in other crew members.

Up in space, Beven or his colleagues will do a private video conference with each astronaut about every two weeks to go over everything pertaining to sleep, crew morale, if that astronaut is dealing well with the workload or experiencing fatigue (or even feeling underworked), their relationship with the ground team, concerns with family, and anything else. If they need immediate help, they can call Beven's cell phone or send him an email in an instant, at any given moment. If any major concerns arise out of these avenues of communication, Beven and his team will confer with the flight surgeon to decide on a course of action.

What kinds of problems are we talking about? For the most part, the typical psychological problems you'd find in space are no different from what you'd find in a high-stress environment here on the surface. They include:

feelings of discouragement

heightened nervousness or anxiety

A nurse working in the E.R. or a long distance runner training for a marathon might experience these kinds of symptoms pretty regularly. But when an astronaut - who is trained more rigorously to withstand stressors - starts to experience these kinds of symptoms, there's a much larger cause for concern, since they're essentially trapped up there in space.

Beven says these problems are not unlike what you might find for someone who is unfamiliar to a long winter in a northern country, or a prisoner who is placed in solitary confinement. "There's nothing unique about the symptoms themselves. What's unique is that, given the spaceflight environment, there's no analogue for them here on Earth, because of the microgravity."

After getting back to Earth, the astronaut undergoes three more psychological assessments - at 3 days, 14 days, and 30 to 45 days after getting back - to go over lessons learned in hindsight and help the astronaut adjust to their new role on the ground.

"Many astronauts, when they land, might not fly again for several years, so they need to determine if they will stay with NASA, or do something else," Beven says - which can be a very difficult, debilitating decision, even among the least neurotic among humans.

The other facet is what Beven calls behavioral support: it's essentially the way he and his team make sure an astronaut has access to hobbies or forms of entertainment that they can indulge in in their leisure time to unwind and de-stress. It could range from music, to watching sporting events or television, having access to games - whatever. Even astronauts love to watch Game of Thrones, and it's critical to keeping their sanity.

"Our belief is that if you're forced for six months or more to live and work in your office, the downtime really needs to be rejuvenating," says Beven.

So far NASA's aerospace psychiatry program has been very successful. Beven says that every astronaut performs "exceptionally well," for 95 percent or more of their mission duration. "Occasionally, they dip down to more mundane frustrations or frictions," he concedes. Yet, for the entire time he and his team have been working with the ISS, "we've not noticed anything that would be of clinical significance," nor anything that would terminate any mission or procedural activity due to psychological detriment.

This is all thanks to the constant communication and support the team can provide astronauts while they're up there in space. But as space travel begins to expand - both in allowing more people access to space travel, and in sending more people out to greater distances beyond Earth's orbit - aerospace psychology will need to change. "In the next 10, 20, or even 50 years, how are we going to provide the system to allow the first Mars crew the same opportunities for psychological support that the ISS crew has - even if there is a 45-minute delay in communications?" asks Beven.

One idea: using A.I. programs to that can provide instant cognitive behavioral therapy to astronauts onboard a spacecraft or working on a Martian or lunar colony. A future astronaut may be having bi-weekly meetings with an artificial robot on their iPad, instead of chatting so frequently with a human being here on Earth. "I don't think anything on Earth right now has been proven to work in that realm, but that's something we need to make certain is working," says Beven.

And as spaceflight becomes commercialized and low-Earth orbit operations are turned over to private companies, it's unlikely commercial astronauts will be as rigorously screened as NASA's astronauts are right now. Beven predicts "there will be someone who does have the first psychotic episode in space," or the first manic episode, or someone who develops a drug or alcohol problem in space.

But he's optimistic: "The way in which those things are dealt with will spread into the psychiatric and psychological community." He thinks, for example, an asteroid mining community will likely contract with a healthcare provider or institution, and work with them to provide on-call psychiatrist and psychologists who are available 24/7. Or, making sure a general physician who is there can detect signs of psychological problems and provide some sort of solution.

At some point, we'll see the first marriage in space, the first child born in space, and more - especially once we see a colony in space or somewhere on another world. "Space travel is becoming normal," says Beven. It's only natural that mental health services acclimate to those changes as well.

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Space Psychology 101: How NASA Keeps Its Astronauts Sane

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Outer space is terrifying -- not just on the body, but also on the mind. Extreme environments and situations can stretch people's minds to the brink of sanity, and outer space is no exception. Sure, astronauts are protected inside their multimillion-dollar spacecraft, but those confined little metallic boxes can mak...

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This article mentions the extreme isolation the people who colonize mars could possibly feel. for example when the astronauts on the ISS get sad their relatives are just a phone call away, whereas the "Martians" will have each other to talk to. The article also mentioned the colony would also have to make sure that they avoid inbreeding.

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As the next giant leap for humankind, the colonization of Mars receives a great deal of attention. When discussing the settlement of Mars, it is important to consider how the Martian environment will affect our human bodies in the long-term - a subject that does not receive as much coverage as colonization itself, yet is vital to ensuring our survival when we get there.

One-Way Ticket to Mars

The notion of leaving the cradle of humanity and settling in greener - or in this case redder - pastures on the fourth rock from the Sun has sparked novels, movies, research facilities, and now one-way missions. We have been conjecturing about life on Mars for centuries and recently, 'Mars to Stay' missions have been proposed by commercial entities in an attempt to bring these dreams to life and finally send humans on a trip to Mars with no return. One such example is the non-profit foundation Mars One, whose goal is to establish a human settlement on Mars by 2025. It has stirred great interest with its optimistic roadmap of giving four volunteers a one-way ticket for a 210 day journey to the Red Planet every 26 months to spend the rest of their lives on Mars.

The Human Body and Gravity

Medically-speaking, getting there is essentially the easy part. The current six-month rotation on-board the International Space Station was partly designed so that it reflects the time taken to get to Mars, resulting in greater knowledge on what state an individual would arrive at Mars in. Physiological effects aboard the ISS range from muscle atrophy to osteoporosis and negative effects on the balance and cardiovascular system. With these mitigated for to some extent, such signs of the body adjusting to daily life without gravity are in synchrony with those likely to be experienced on a journey to Mars. As a result, the trip itself will not be so different to living on board the ISS - however the consequences of travelling beyond low Earth orbit and then living on Mars is far less familiar territory in space research. After a long space flight, astronauts find it difficult to stand and orientate themselves in the weight of Earth's gravity. A crew of post-mission specialists are ready to assist astronauts upon landing on Earth, but this will not be the case for the first settlers on Mars. The surface gravity of Mars is 38% that of Earth. That might make it slightly easier on landing, but in the long run, the full force of gravity that our bodies have adapted to will not be present to re-strengthen the astronauts' cells, bones, and muscles as they readapt to a gravity environment. Adjusting to this lower level of gravitational pull on Mars may cause a physiological change in the astronauts' bone density, muscle strength, and circulation making it impossible to survive under Earth conditions if they were to ever return.
- In the video below, effects of space on human physiology.
Earthlings or Martians?

The side-effects of travelling to, landing, and living on Mars are far greater in terms of both psychology and physiology. Travelling outside of Earth's protective magnetic field to a distance so great that our planet is no more than a speck on the horizon will have a profound effect on the crew.

Aboard the ISS, if astronauts are feeling down, family and friends are simply a phone call away. The astronauts are also able to change their perspective by basking in the beauty of the revolving planet beneath them. However, as Earth shrinks to merely a dot on the horizon and the crew begin to live and work on the surface on Mars, the time delay across the vast expanse of space increases and eventually phone calls with loved ones become impractical. With communication signals taking between 3 and 22 minutes to travel each way, the ability to sustain a real conversation with anybody on Earth is not an option ever again.

This may eventually change the way that the crew view themselves. Psychologically, it is speculated that they will become Martians within weeks and will view themselves as a separate entity from Earthlings. The psychological isolation experiment Mars-500 explored this and other side-effects of crew isolation during a year and a half simulation of a round-trip mission to Mars.

Romain Charles, who along with Diego Urbina and four other crew members spent 520-days in the Mars mission simulation, shared his thoughts on the defining moment when they felt separate from the outside world.

It's a tough question as we didn't have any windows (or a simulated window) in our modules. Diego created an animation which allowed us to have a better understanding of what we would be able to see (or not see) but it came a bit later... I would say that, it's not really the view of the Earth that changed our perspective. For me, the moment when we couldn't phone the control center brought more "distance" between our crew and the world around than any window.

Advancements in virtual reality technologies may aid the crew in maintaining their mental health and stimulate their sensory systems, providing the ability to virtually transcend to a familiar location on Earth that has fond memories associated with it.

The Environment of Mars

In order to assess the physiological effects of living on the surface of Mars, the Martian environment must be considered. Although it is orbiting 50% further away from the Sun and is 11% smaller than Earth, Mars is remarkably similar to our blue marble. With polar ice caps, seasonal changes, and weather patterns, it appears to be relatively comparable.

However, the absence of an ozone layer and liquid water are both extreme factors in the safety of astronauts. The presence of 'superoxides' that break down in the presence of ultraviolet radiation in Martian soil and a much lower level of thermal inertia on Mars also makes it difficult to predict how the human body will cope in such an environment. Martian dust devils, monster columns of spiraling red-brown sand and dust ten times larger than tornadoes found on Earth are predicted to also pose a threat to Martian settlers.

Currently exploring the surface of the Red Planet is NASA's Curiosity rover. Its radiation-detecting instrument Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD) collected data that suggests that the risk of radiation exposure on a 180-day each-way return trip to Mars with 500 days on the surface would expose astronauts to a cumulative radiation dose of about 1.01 sieverts. However, the long-term radiation dosage for those dwelling permanently on the red planet requires much further investigation.

Simulations of life on Mars in analogue Earth environments such as the Mars Analog Research Station (MARS) project established by the Mars Society help to reveal the mystery behind life on Mars. This is a global program of Mars exploration in four Mars base-like habitats located in the deserts of the Canadian Arctic, the Utah Desert, the Australian outback, and Iceland - allowing novel insights to be gained and field research to be conducted by rotating crews. Such research in Mars-like environments is a valuable source of knowledge for researchers and inspiration for enthusiasts with the vision of human exploration of Mars.

The Martian habitat will undoubtedly need to protect the crew from long-term radiation exposure. Using Mars One proposes to solve this challenge via a habitat covered by a layer of soil that provides shielding against galactic cosmic rays. They state that sixteen feet (5 meters) of Martian soil provides the same protection as the Earth's atmosphere - equivalent to 1,000 grams per square cm (227.6 ounces per square inch) of shielding. If the colonists spend two hours a day outside the habitat, their individual exposure adds up to 22 mSv per year. Key research into habitat and spacesuit technology is to be done in order to provide sufficient radiation shielding so that the settler is made safe when both indoors and outside on the surface of Mars.
- Mars One promotional video.
Future Research

Eventually, humans will journey to Mars and settle on our neighboring planet; however this journey remains the greatest challenge of our time at present. In order to thrive on the Red Planet in the future, it is vital that thorough research into the Martian environment and its interaction with the complex human body is carried out now. In particular, long-term isolation studies that simulate not only the journey to Mars, as in the case of the Mars 500 experiment, but also daily life on the surface of Mars as a human settler are needed. Medical experiments investigating the environmental effects of the Martian environment such as prolonged radiation and reduced gravity should also be carried out.

Understanding these effects is critical to maintaining the health of those pioneering few that are bold enough to take the next step in humanity's journey through the cosmos and it will ensure the survival of our species for many generations to come, as Earthlings and Martians.

Tags analog colony gravity Mars Mars 500 Mars Desert Research Station Mars One muscle atrophy osteoporosis Radiation Romain Charles settlers

About the author

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How Will Living On Mars Affects Our Human Body?

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As the next giant leap for humankind, the colonization of Mars receives a great deal of attention. When discussing the settlement of Mars, it is important to consider how the Martian environment will affect our human bodies in the long-term - a subject that does not receive as much coverage as colonization itself, yet is vital to ensuring our survival when we get there.

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This article mirrors the ideas of some of the first articles we read this week, but also includes valuable information about how difficult it could be for the Mars astronauts to maintain a sleep schedule. They also focus on the severity of the Earth-out-of-view phenomenon and how that has negatively affected most astronauts that have been in space previously.

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If all goes as NASA - and Elon Musk - have planned, at some point in the not-too-distant future, a group of astronauts will begin a years-long round trip to Mars. In NASA's plan, during each six-month (or more) leg of the journey, the members of a small crew will strap themselves into a cramped spacecraft that offers limited opportunities for recreation, distraction or privacy. As they get farther from Earth, they'll be increasingly isolated from everything they've ever known. Real-time communication with mission control or family members will become impossible.

All of that is a recipe for psychological stress, even above and beyond what astronauts have already experienced. So scientists are trying to identify the unique mental pressures that would accompany a trip to Mars so they can select crews who will cope the best, prepare them to handle the difficulties they will face, and learn how best to help them when they're millions of miles away.

Obviously, the first trip to Mars will be unprecedented. So for clues to what astronauts will face, researchers at NASA and other organizations are relying on various analogs. They've studied long-term missions to the International Space Station and to other isolated, extreme environments where humans live in confined spaces - Antarctica, for example - and they have conducted controlled studies that shut participants in environments designed to mimic the conditions in space in order to identify potential sources of conflict. According to Nick Kanas, a psychiatry professor emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco and the author of "Humans in Space: The Psychological Hurdles," some of the stressors that come with long-duration space missions include confinement, isolation, the inherently dangerous environment, and monotony. And there are interpersonal stressors, too - conflicts that could arise within a team or with the ground crew.

The NASA selection process includes psychiatric and psychological screening designed to weed out people with behavioral health issues. A NASA report released last year notes that "while mood and anxiety disturbances have occurred, no behavioral emergencies have been reported to date in space flight." A longer mission, though, "greatly increases" the chance that an adverse cognitive or behavioral condition or psychiatric disorder will emerge. That means that in addition to screening candidates, it's crucial to anticipate problems and have a plan to offer support or therapy from afar. The selection panel also looks to identify the people who are most suited to the new challenges of long-haul missions - those who have attributes like working well in teams and understanding how to live peacefully in a group as well as emotional stability and composure under stress.

It's not clear exactly when potential behavioral and interpersonal problems are most likely to pop up. In one simulation called Mars 500, which was conducted in Russia, six male participants - similar in age, career and education to ISS astronauts and selected by the Russian Federation, European Space Agency and China National Space Administration - lived together in a closed chamber for 520 days. They answered weekly questionnaires to gauge their moods, depression levels, conflicts with others, reaction time, stress and fatigue. Researchers found that the response to stressors varied among participants; one man, for example, showed at least some symptoms of depression in 93 percent of the mission weeks. Two crew members showed no signs of behavioral disturbances or psychological distress during the simulation.

But crew members' coping abilities - or lack thereof - showed themselves pretty early on in the mission, said David Dinges, professor and director of the unit for experimental psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine and an author of the study. That suggests it might be easier to pick up on these vulnerabilities in much shorter confinement studies, raising the chances of identifying candidates who are either suboptimal or who might need extra support during the mission.

Some, but by no means all, research has found that on longer space missions and in other extreme environments, psychological and interpersonal difficulties seem to ramp up after the halfway point. "The idea is that some crew members arrive at this milestone with relief that things are going well, only to realize that there is still another half to go before they will be home," Kanas wrote in a paper on potential psychosocial issues during a Mars mission. Kelley Slack, an industrial-organizational psychologist and a member of NASA's behavioral health and performance astronaut-selection team, said that while this so-called third-quarter effect doesn't seem to occur consistently, mission organizers might be wise to provide care packages, special events (perhaps done through virtual reality) or other treats to boost spirits at a time when astronauts might be particularly vulnerable.

Some of the potential pitfalls of a Mars trip are the same as those of previous missions or analogs, only compounded. For example, astronauts will experience microgravity - which can be disorienting and uncomfortable - for much longer. Confinement and isolation are always a problem, but the habitable space in the International Space Station is big - about 15,000 cubic feet. That's the volume of a roughly 1,700-square-foot home with 9-foot ceilings, but because astronauts are weightless, that third dimension serves as habitable, floatable space. The Space Station also offers opportunities for multiple exercise and leisure activities, Slack said. We don't know exactly how big a Mars vehicle will be, but NASA is planning for something that will offer a fraction of the living space on the ISS - current recommendations are for at least 883 cubic feet of habitable space per person, or about 5,300 cubic feet for a six-person crew. (This document shows a proposed layout.) To put that in perspective, I live with two other people (one of them much smaller than the average astronaut), and in our smallish Brooklyn apartment we each have about 2,850 cubic feet of living space. Of course, we can't float to take advantage of all of it.

Storage space will be at a premium, which will make it hard to take, for example, a variety of foods to maintain sensory stimulation. That may sound like a small thing, but imagine the mood you'd be in if you were stuck eating barbecue-flavored energy bars for breakfast for months on end.

Astronauts' sleep cycles, too, can be thrown out of whack, which has wide-ranging implications. When people sleep badly - whether they're not getting enough sleep or their sleep-wake schedule has drifted off the 24-hour cycle, which can happen in the absence of regular stimuli like sunrise and sunset - that affects our brains and behavior, Dinges said. "Emotions deteriorate, it can be harder to concentrate, you may feel like others are picking on you." During the Mars 500 simulation, the same two crew members who experienced no behavioral or psychological problems also showed no sleep or circadian disturbances.

Using blue-spectrum light to promote wakefulness and turning that light off to promote sleep can help keep people on a regular, consistent sleep-wake cycle, but Dinges said there's some evidence that even when lighting cues are used, a subset of space travelers may still experience poor sleep quality that affects their stress and exhaustion levels. Scientists are trying to figure out why, Dinges said. (Sleep is likely to be an issue once astronauts reach Mars as well.)

Then there are the things that the analogs can't fully capture. For one: the full significance of the two-way 25- to 44-minute communications gap between Earth and Mars (this varies depending on the planets' positions). Practically speaking, that makes it tough to maintain a normal back-and-forth with support crew or friends and family at home; at minimum, conversational styles will need to be adjusted. Slack said her group at NASA is looking into whether a modified form of behavioral therapy - perhaps delivered the way some apps now offer therapy via text messages, allowing patients and therapists to respond on their own time frame - might be effective for astronauts who need help with stress or other mental health issues. And there's also ongoing research into using virtual reality to interact with family members as avatars in non-space settings. For example, an astronaut could create a VR treasure hunt, hiding Easter eggs for a child to discover later. But even with these adaptations, it's hard to know how astronauts will handle the communication delay. Earthbound experiments can simulate the time lag - and several have, including Mars 500 and HI-SEAS, a NASA-funded program simulating Mars missions in Hawaii - but it's impossible to simulate how someone will feel when they know that the delay exists because they are hundreds of millions of miles away from their fellow Earthlings.

That sense of isolation will likely only be heightened by something called the Earth-out-of-view phenomenon, which happens when our home planet diminishes in size until it becomes indistinguishable from other astral bodies. "No one has ever lost complete contact with Earth visually," Kanas said. At the very least, not being able to see our planet could take a big source of enjoyment out of the trip, since a survey of 39 astronauts and cosmonauts found that the top positive effect of going to space was gaining a stronger appreciation of Earth's beauty and fragility. On the space station, the top leisure activity is looking out at Earth, either photographing it or just watching it roll by, Slack said.

We can only imagine how astronauts might feel as Earth dwindles in the window. Will that shrinking dot inspire them as interplanetary explorers? Or will it fill them with existential dread? There's only one way to find out.

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If all goes as NASA - and Elon Musk - have planned, at some point in the not-too-distant future, a group of astronauts will begin a years-long round trip to Mars. In NASA's plan, during each six-month (or more) leg of the journey, the members of a small crew will strap themselves into a cramped spacecraft that offers limited opportunities for recreation, distraction or privacy.

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This article talks about bringing people to Mars and turning it into a reality TV show. It will be a 24 hour live surveillance TV show where the people will be left alone all by themselves. If the plan goes through, then the Mars mission of 2030 will be dubbed the Mars rescue.

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Everyone and their mother wants to send people to Mars these days. Dutch spaceflight nonprofits, President Obama, and even Buzz Aldrin have seriously discussed plans to put humans on the inhospitable planet in the next few decades. But what happens when they get there?

The aforementioned nonprofit, Mars One, hopes to turn the first human colonization of another planet into a reality TV show, allowing people on Earth to watch the settlers' every move. As the points out, though, the first few permanent Mars colonists will face more than just a freezing, dust-ridden environment. They're also likely to careen over the edge of psychological instability as everyone back home watches.

The combination of utter social isolation, eternal confinement in a tiny Mars-One-constructed habitat, the 24-hour surveillance of reality TV, and a lack of mental health services will converge to drive the few dozen people selected to die on the red planet completely bonkers. Even astronauts who know they're coming home eventually can become depressed and anxious in the lonely vacuum of space. Imagine being stuck in a tiny survival pod with only a few people, with transmission delays impeding your ability to keep in touch with people on Earth, unable to travel freely outside on the freezing, barren dustball that is the Martian surface. Forever. Until you die, going down in history as one of the first boldly idiotic explorers of a new world.

"Mars One is either ignoring the psychological consequences of colonisation or failing to disclose them," the Guardian notes. "Either way, if their plan goes ahead - and for the sake of the colonists we might hope that it doesn't - then Nasa's manned mission in the 2030s may well be dubbed Mars Rescue." Until they send a team of psychotherapists, best to explore from home, for now.

Read more on the psychological ramifications of a permanent Mars colony here.

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Why Mars Colonists Will Definitely Go Crazy

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Everyone and their mother wants to send people to Mars these days. Dutch spaceflight nonprofits, President Obama, and even Buzz Aldrin have seriously discussed plans to put humans on the inhospitable planet in the next few decades. But what happens when they get there?

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This article details the experiment that was conducted about humans being on fake mars. Four people were put into a dome to see how they would get along and survive in isolation. They stated that they worked together very well and never used a personal insult once.

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Losing internet access was a bigger problem than personality clashes for six 'astronauts' confined for eight months on a remote simulated Mars base, a British member of the team has said.

Not a single personal insult was uttered by any member of the crew during the whole of the 'mission' that ended on September 17, claimed astrobiologist Sam Payler, 28, a Phd student at the University of Edinburgh.

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Being without the internet created more difficulty than social conflict, since it meant problems took days instead of minutes to solve.

Speaking from Hawaii, where the four men and two women had lived in a 1,200 square foot dome situated on a barren active volcano, Mr Payler said: 'I was very lucky to have a great crew.

'No isolated group can be immune to any arguments, but everyone did an amazing job of working through any issues we had.

'We spent a lot of time talking about how to avoid conflict. Incredibly, not once did anyone use a personal insult.

'The group was very carefully selected to try and get a group that would work well together and get along, and we seem to have achieved that.'

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The Hi-Seas (Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation) mission was the fifth in a series of similar experiments funded by the American space agency Nasa.

The aim was to identify and overcome psychological and social problems that might emerge on long-haul space missions.

During their time together on an 8,200ft high rocky plain below the summit of Mauno Loa, the crew members lived and worked as if they were on Mars, carrying out maintenance, conducting scientific studies and exercising.

They relied on 'shelf-stable' food and were denied all fresh fruit, meat or vegetables. Space suits had to be worn on excursions outside the dome, which were carried out in teams.

In an exclusive interview with the Press Association, Mr Payler said: 'Our days were packed with the types of task work which helped us not go stir crazy. Keeping focused and busy is key to keeping physiological health up. We also worked out a lot (six times a week for me) to keep spirits high and help us deal with the physical EVA work (going out on the volcano in space suits).

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'The habitat never felt small to me, partly because I got on so well with my crew mates. We always found fun things to do such as watch movies together or play board games.

'Had we not got along so well, I'm sure it would have felt a lot more claustrophobic.'

He said he especially missed 'fresh fruit, juice, ice cream, steak, fresh seafood and beer'.

Mr Payler added: 'The morning we "landed" we were brought fresh fruit, doughnuts and a few items a few people had requested from McDonald's (Sausage and Egg McMuffins).

'Later, the mission support folks barbecued us some steak and prawns which was amazing. We also went to a bar for some local Hawaiian beer and cocktails.'

Browsing the internet was impossible because of a 20 minute communication delay intended to mimic the time it takes for radio signals to travel between Earth and Mars.

This departure from modern life on Earth proved to be one of the crew's greatest challenges, said Mr Payler.

'The lack of internet and long delay meant problem solving was often very difficult, with issues that might normally take five minutes to solve taking two to three days,' he said.

'We also couldn't use social media or speak live to anyone back on Earth, and so communicated only through pre-recorded messages and emails. The crew were the only people we saw and spoke to for eight months.'

Re-adjusting to normal life was 'a little strange', he admitted, adding that all the crew members were 'a bit nervous' before leaving.

He was struck by the desolate beauty of the Mars-like landscape surrounding the dome.

'Everything we had been looking at outside the habitat had been through a scratched space suit visor or small habitat window,' he said. 'Suddenly we could see the spectacular environment we had been living in clearly.'

Asked if he would consider travelling to Mars if offered the chance, Mr Payler said: 'My answer might be quite different if asked that for real as opposed to as a hypothetical. It would be an amazing adventure and a great honour, but also extremely dangerous.

'I would have to assess where I was in my life and weigh up the risks very carefully. But could I ever turn it down? I am not sure I could.'

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Astronauts on fake Mars mission reveal what they missed most during 8 months isolation

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Losing internet access was a bigger problem than personality clashes for six 'astronauts' confined for eight months on a remote simulated Mars base, a British member of the team has said. Not a single personal insult was uttered by any member of the crew during the whole of the 'mission' that ended on September 17, claimed astrobiologist Sam Payler, 28, a Phd student at the University of Edinburgh.

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Space is considered the harshest environment for human to travel in. Sending normal people there would be considered unethical. But if the travelers were considered military personal then it seems normal, because soldiers are expected to face dangers.

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How do you decide whether putting human life at risk is the right thing to do? By Laurie Zoloth.

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This article address social issues related to going to Mars. The author mainly talks about reasons not to go to Mars, including the idea that if there is so much money being spent on a way to preserve life on another planet, why not use that money to sustain life here?

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Juvenal, that biting pundit of the Roman Empire, complained of weak leaders distracting the people with " panem et circenses " - bread and circuses. In our day, it's moon bases and missions to Mars.

Europe is splintering. North Korea has gone full " Dr. Strangelove." Disaster in Puerto Rico. Massacre in Las Vegas. Crickets chirping on Capitol Hill, where Republican promises go to die. With so much to be done and few plans for doing it, the people need to be distracted. So Vice President Pence was trotted out last week to revive a long-dormant presidential commission and get American astronauts back into space.

Perhaps you thought our astronauts never left space. Haven't they been space walking, repairing telescopes, performing experiments and making music videos up there for years? Turns out those missions take place in " low Earth orbit," less than 350 miles from home. Millions of kids have ventured farther to attend college than our astronauts have traveled from Earth these past 45 years.

Though Pence's commission is unlikely to tell you, there are very good reasons Americans, and other humans, abruptly stopped going deep into space. It's deadly. It's unnecessary. And to borrow from Gertrude Stein, there's no there there.

Doubtless, Americans could return to the moon, and even stay there for a while. It would cost vast sums, but we have good credit and high tolerance for debt. The question is why. The moon is still the same dead, dusty desert we left in 1972. Ice-covered Antarctica and the Sarahan sands are both far more hospitable to human life than the moon.

A moon base makes zero sense on its own terms, so it's pitched as a trampoline to Mars. Face it: The Red Planet has the best PR in the solar system. What Scientology is to creepy movie stars, Mars travel is to swashbuckling billionaires. Elon Musk, Richard Branson and Jeffrey P. Bezos (owner of The Post) have all set their sights on the fourth rock from the sun, with Musk saying he hopes to die there - "just not on impact."

Boosterish scientists report that midday temperatures may reach a balmy 60-plus degrees on the Mars version of St. Tropez, but Musk better pack a heavy snowsuit to go with his Speedo. Having virtually zero atmosphere to hold the warmth, the planet cools off overnight to around 90 degrees below zero at the equator. The average temperature, according to NASA, is 81 below.

Still, a human traveler to Mars should make the most of its airless monotony, because there is no coming back. The long passage through the vacuum of space will expose astronauts to intense and prolonged bombardment by cosmic rays and unimpeded solar radiation - a death sentence for which NASA has no solution ( though scientists continue to seek one). At the Hotel Mars, you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.

What's more, Mars is a dead end. As fatally desolate and brutal as Mars is, our neighbor planet is the most habitable destination for many, many light years in any direction.

Science fiction can be seductive. Of course we want to boldly go where no one has gone before. But space exploration is a job for robots, not humans. Nature has adapted us exquisitely and precisely for life in one particular ecosystem in one remote corner of an incomprehensibly vast universe.

But here's the good news: It's a really nice ecosystem! Earth is blanketed with a breathable atmosphere, and the gravity's just right to hold us in place without crushing our bodies. There is snow for skiing, and there are beaches for tanning. Land and seas teem with food - so much that the ever-growing human population has never been better nourished than today. There are wondrous things to see, such as Yellowstone, the Louvre and Willie Nelson.

The vice president touted the commercial prospects for humans in space, but that, too, is a distraction. There is no economic enterprise (apart from space tourism) that can be done more efficiently by humans in space than by space robots or humans on the ground. It's all pie in the sky.

Other promoters of moon bases and Mars colonies are doomsday theorists, grimly laboring under the belief that humans are going to destroy the Earth and need to have a lifeboat ready. This is dangerous thinking. For all the troubles in our current home, they are small compared with the problems of living in a terrarium on a frozen rock under skies composed of 95 percent carbon dioxide. If we have money and energy and brainpower enough to build settlements on distant wastelands, we are better off deploying those resources to preserve the bountiful planet we already have.

The vast and murderous universe has conspired to maroon the human race - but what a wonderful island we're on. Rather than go in search of dust bowls to die in, let us send our robot eyes and ears to explore the lifeless seas of space, marveling at their findings while giving thanks that we're not with them.

Read more from David Von Drehle's archive.

Read more on this topic:

Christian Davenport: Elon Musk says his next spaceship will not only take you to the moon and Mars, but from N.Y. to London in 29 minutes

Buzz Aldrin: The next giant leap for space exploration

The Post's View: The Cassini mission embodies the best of humanity

Tom Toles: If you are prepared to die, the Mars colony is a good bet for you

Adam Schiff: In the name of Curiosity, fully fund the Mars mission

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Opinion | The mission to Mars is one stupid leap for mankind

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Juvenal, that biting pundit of the Roman Empire, complained of weak leaders distracting the people with " panem et circenses " - bread and circuses. In our day, it's moon bases and missions to Mars. Europe is splintering. North Korea has gone full " Dr. Strangelove." Disaster in Puerto Rico.

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This article takes a closer look at the possible effects of Mars colonists being aware that they are so far from Earth. Because the problem is dependent on leaving Earth, the theorized "earth-out-of-view-phenomenon" can not be studied on Earth or in orbit like other psychological problems such as confinement.

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Advertisement

There are going to be plenty of technological and physiological hurdles to jump before we land the first astronauts on Mars. But once they're safely on their journey, another kind of challenge may rear it's head. What happens when you can no longer see Earth?

Even the quickest Mars trip is going to be long. If you get the timing right, as Dennis Tito plans to, you could manage a round trip to Mars in 501 days. Most missions, especially if they land on the surface and do a bit of exploring, will take longer.

Leaving aside the not-so-tiny medical problems with long-term spaceflight like muscle and bone wastage, eye problems and increased radiation levels -- keeping six people happy on a Mars mission is going to be hard. For example, sleep deprivation, as discovered by the Mars 500 simulation participants, can be a problem. Of course, Mars 500 also showed that we can do experiments here on Earth to work out how to overcome these problems.

One thing it's harder to test for is what happens to someone when they can no longer see their home planet.

Earthshine by Manu Gopinath from Manu Prasad Gopinath on Vimeo.

This bittersweet animation, by Manu Prasad Gopinath, captures some of the loneliness the first astronauts to land on Mars might feel at being so far away from home.

But the truth is we don't know what astronauts will experience when they finally lose sight of Earth. The moon is as far as anyone has ever been.

For reference, from the moon, the Earth looks like this:

From Mars, like this:

David Green is a lecturer in human and aerospace physiology at King's College London. I spoke to him earlier this year for an article about the Mars 500 simulation, but he's worked with spacefaring astronauts too. He told me:

"The crewmembers who've been to the moon, they all say how disconcerting it was as they got further and further away from Earth. These guys knew that they were going to an object that wasn't that far away. If you're going to Mars, at some point the Earth is going to go to the size of a pin, and then you'll lose sight. What that will do to somebody, who knows?"

It's a problem that's been considered before. In her book Packing for Mars, Mary Roach quotes the following passage from the book Space Psychology and Psychiatry:

"In the history of human beings, no one has ever been on the situation when Mother Earth, and all of her nurturing and comforting aspects... has been reduced to insignificance in the sky... It seems possible that it will induce some state of internal uncoupling from the Earth. Such a state might be associated with a broad range of individual maladaptive responses, including anxiety and depressive reactions, suicidal intention, or even psychotic symptoms such as hallucinations or delusions. In addition, a partial or complete loss of commitment to the usual (Earth-bound) system of values and behavioural norms may occur."

Roach calls it the "earth-out-of-view-phenomenon", and we can guess at what it might be like, or even whether it exists at all. (In Roach's book, cosmonaut Sergei Krikalyov dismisses the idea, saying: "Psychologists need to write papers".)

But we're really going to need to go to Mars (or some other faraway part of the solar system) to find out for sure.

The views expressed are those of the author(s) and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Kelly Oakes

Kelly Oakes has a master's degree in science communication and a degree in physics, both from Imperial College London. She started this blog so she could share some amazing stories about space, astrophysics, particle physics and more with other people, and partly so she could explore those stories herself.

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There are going to be plenty of technological and physiological hurdles to jump before we land the first astronauts on Mars. But once they're safely on their journey, another kind of challenge may rear it's head. What happens when you can no longer see Earth? Even the quickest Mars trip is going to be long.

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This article talks about the benefits of leaving Mars as an independent nation to create its own laws and culture

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It's a popular sci-fi plot: Earth sets up colonies on Mars; Mars colonies grow, developing their own technologies and culture; Mars colonies rebel against overbearing Earth government, demanding independence. It happens in Total Recall, in Babylon 5, in Red Mars.

But what if we gave Mars its independence right from the get-go? Rather than giving future colonies to governments or corporations, Jacob Haqq-Misra thinks we should let Martian colonists develop their own values, governments, and technologies, with minimal interference from Earth. Haqq-Misra is an astrobiologist at the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science, a non-profit organization that promotes international unity in space.

Not only would Haqq-Misra's strategy preclude any Martian wars for independence, but cultural independence could help Martians think differently enough to solve problems that Earth continues to struggle with-such as working together to fight global environmental problems, or making long-term plans for the future of humanity.

"Maybe Mars is more valuable in trying to seed the second incidence of civilization."

Instead of getting divided by nations or plundered by industry, says Haqq-Misra, "maybe Mars is more valuable in trying to seed the second incidence of civilization."

A Free Mars

The plan that Haqq-Misra lays out in an essay in New Space has five main provisions:

Humans who leave Earth to permanently settle on Mars relinquish their planetary citizenship as Earthlings and claim a planetary citizenship as Martians.

Governments, corporations, and individuals of Earth cannot engage in commerce with Mars and cannot interfere with the political, cultural, economic, or social development of Martian civilization.

Scientific exploration may continue as long as it does not interfere with the development of civilization on Mars. Sharing of research and information between Mars and Earth is permitted only to pursue mutual scientific or educational goals.

The use of land on Mars will be determined exclusively by the citizens of Mars. No Earthlings may own or otherwise lay claim to land on Mars.

Any technology, resources, or other objects brought from Earth to Mars become permanent fixtures of the Martian civilization. Earthlings may not make any demands for resources on Mars.

You Can't Own Mars, But You Can Rule A Colony

There is some legal precedent for the idea. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which 103 nations (including the U.S. and Russia) are party to, prohibits any nation from claiming territory in space. The treaty "makes very clear that a colony on Mars could never become a colony in the classical legal sense of the word, like the U.S. was originally a colony of the U.K.," says Frans von der Dunk, a space law professor at the University of Nebraska.

Nevertheless, under the current legal system, von der Dunk says American colonists on Mars would still probably fall under U.S. jurisdiction.

Sailors in international waters are expected to follow the rules of their ship's flag, and astronauts must do the same. The rules even hold when they're not on board the ship-for example, when the Apollo astronauts roamed around the moon, or when astronauts on the International Space Station do spacewalks, they're still subject to U.S. laws.

But what about when the excursion is longer than a few hours? On the ISS, where astronauts spend months at a time, participating countries have worked up their own quasi legal system, which is pretty similar to Earth's. If an American astronaut were to hit a Russian astronaut over the head, for example, first the U.S. would have the right to determine whether a criminal act was committed. If the U.S. doesn't take action, then he could be tried under Russian jurisdiction.

The rules could be different when we're talking about pioneers who venture to another planet with no intention of returning home. Still, says von der Dunk, "You cannot simply say 'I'm no longer a citizen of the U.S.' It's not for you to decide."

Cultural (R)evolution

Von der Dunk thinks that if Americans are able to set up self-sustaining communities on Mars, they'll consider themselves Americans and abide by U.S. laws-at least at first. "At some point in time, they will not like that anymore," he says. "They won't feel like they are American or Russian or wherever they come from, they'll feel like they are Martian. They will say, 'Listen, we don't want to pay taxes anymore, and we want to develop our own legal system.'"

Cultural evolution is inevitable in small populations that splinter off from Earth. A lot of Earthly traditions just won't apply, and the Martians will develop their own jokes, rules, and customs. Haqq-Misra's suggestion of limiting contact with Earth would simply speed up that transition.

Von der Dunk thinks it would be difficult to set up a colony as a blank slate, as Haqq-Misra proposes. Mars colonists would carry with them a lot of legal and cultural baggage that biases their ideas about how society should work. But over time, Martian culture could change dramatically. "It's hard to think outside the box there, but one could think that because Mars is so different from Earth, that when they tear themselves away from traditional legal structures, they could develop something very new," says von der Dunk. "This is all very hypothetical."

Getting There Is Half The Battle

There are other potential problems. Getting to Mars ain't easy, and there are a lot of ways to die once you get there. Unfortunately, Earth's help won't come cheap: these days it costs about $10,000 to send one pound of supplies to the space station, and that's a much closer, easier trip than Mars. Without the financial incentives of Martian communities, resources, and/or business, nations and private companies aren't likely to rally around the Free Mars idea. Haqq-Misra's plan relies on either extremely thorough planning to make sure the colonies are completely self-sufficient, or generous donations to send resupply missions to Mars.

Haqq-Misra says he's not holding his breath for anyone to jump on this idea. Still, he says, since everyone from NASA to SpaceX and Mars One has their sights set on visiting or colonizing Mars in the coming decades, it's important to think about.

"Hopefully it's going to instigate people to have a longer-term vision for whatever we do on Mars."

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Should Mars Be Independent, Or Just A Colony Of Earth?

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It's a popular sci-fi plot: Earth sets up colonies on Mars; Mars colonies grow, developing their own technologies and culture; Mars colonies rebel against overbearing Earth government, demanding independence. It happens in Total Recall, in Babylon 5, in Red Mars. But what if we gave Mars its independence right from the get-go?

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This article talks about the important role media can play in reducing negative psychological and social issues astronauts going to Mars might struggle with. Its major points include how media 1) can create a way to systematically break up your day 2) can help you connect with other people 3) can provide solitude and 4) can remind people of their home and culture.

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Long-Range Space Journey

No one knows for sure what a long-range space journey will be like for the people on board. Nobody in the history of our species has ever had to deal with the "Earth-out-of-view" phenomenon, for instance. How will it feel to live in close quarters with a small group, with no escape hatch? How will space travelers deal with the prospect of not seeing family or friends for years, or even ever again? How will they occupy themselves for years with nothing much to do?

Researchers do know some things from observing astronauts who've stayed in space stations revolving around Earth for long periods of time, people who spent a lot of time shut off from the outside world in isolated regions (such as on polar expeditions) and from experiments with simulated Mars missions.

Because astronauts would have a lot of free time to fill, some researchers have casually suggested sending along a selection of books and films or even bespoke video games. As a social scientist who studies media use and its effects on behavior, I believe television could help. Recreating the media environment from before we had permanent, continuous access to anything we want to watch or listen to might be just the thing to help space travelers cope with a loss of a sense of space and time, with loneliness, privacy issues, boredom and more.

Floating Rudderless in Space and Time

In space, the distinction between days of the week, day and night, or morning and noon will be mostly meaningless. Before DVDs and streaming, television helped us structure our time. For some, "lunch" was when a particular game show came on. "Evening" started with the news. "Thursday" was when the next episode of our favorite drama finally arrived. Seasonal programming split the year into chunks (Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas). Annual events, such as the Super Bowl, helped us realize yet another year had passed.

A media system that recreates structured access would help define time in space, something unlimited access to a random list of movies would not. Knowing that you were watching something that millions of others were watching at the same time created a particular group feeling - think tuning in to a royal wedding or a presidential funeral. It remains to be seen how today's fracturing of the media landscape has changed that. Interestingly, one of the earliest occasions where millions around the world shared a bond in front of their or their neighbor's TV was the first lunar landing.

Out of Reach, Out of Touch

One reason prisoners like to watch television is that it shows them how the world outside is evolving. If we don't want long-range space travelers to return feeling like aliens, they will need to keep up-to-date with what's happening back on Earth.

Television news has an "agenda setting" effect: It tells viewers not only what is going on, but also what matters to people, and public opinion about current events. Entertainment media, from reality shows to game shows to drama, display how fashion, vocabulary and even accents are evolving.

Tuning in to what's going on back home is also a way to counteract the "Earth-out-of-view" phenomenon. The feeling of being on top of what's happening on Earth may help keep the psychological connection to the home planet active and strong.

Heritage Maintenance

Members of a crew are likely to have different cultural backgrounds. The distinctions are biggest if they come from far-flung countries or different language families.

Immigrants, for instance, use the media to integrate more quickly into their new culture. But exposure to home media is also a way to keep a connection to (and derive support from) the culture of origin. Imagine a crew consisting mainly of people from the United States, but with one member from, say, Japan. It will be equally important to facilitate integration and bonding by making media content available that everyone can consume as a group as it is to make specific content available that (in this example) may cater to a person who grew up in Japan.

Balancing Solitude and Community

As individuals, astronauts will crave autonomy and privacy. Media can help create "alone time." Being immersed in a book, a movie or music (using headphones) helps lock out the environment, as every teenager knows.

At the same time, astronauts as a group will need to work on interconnection to be successful. Even though media are often blamed for dissolving social cohesion, they can also create and reinforce powerful feelings of community and group cohesion. Even in families where everyone has their own smartphone and a TV set, a lot of group viewing occursbecause members enjoy being in each other's company. Spectator sports, in particular, can create strong bonds.

Of course, it makes sense that individuals' interests differ among groups, cultures and genders, as well as with personal preferences. A supportive media access program will need careful pretesting long before the journey starts.

Building On How We Already Use Media

Media can do much more. People turn to media for mood management, either when they feel down or want to relax. The distraction caused by media is usually seen as negative for people trying to avoid overeating, but if food is bland and monotonous, that might be a good thing.

There are dangers, too. Media can distract from necessary tasks, affect sleep or lead to addiction-like behaviors. News from Earth or exposure to social media could induce fear and anxiety for loved ones.

There is, finally, a more mundane but perhaps also more fundamental reason to incorporate media into the daily lives of future Mars travelers. They will be drawn from a generation that grew up immersed in and surrounded by media access and content. Recreating a reasonable facsimile of that environment may go a long way toward making astronauts feel a little bit more at home out there.

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Astronauts could use TV, video games to combat isolation in space

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No one knows for sure what a long-range space journey will be like for the people on board. Nobody in the history of our species has ever had to deal with the "Earth-out-of-view" phenomenon, for instance. How will it feel to live in close quarters with a small group, with no escape hatch?

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This article discusses the issues surrounding preparing for Mars. There is no way to perfectly simulate the physical and mental conditions one would be exposed to. This could lead to major issues.

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In 2016, two astronauts finished nearly a year of work on the International Space Station. NASA's Scott Kelly and Russia's Mikhail Kornienko were studied closely for changes in their physical and psychological health.

NASA touts the mission as part of its "Journey to Mars", in which it hopes to send humans to the Red Planet by the 2030s. But a recent paper published in the journal Space Policy argues that there are so many aspects to a Martian colony that it is all but impossible to simulate the parameters on Earth.

"We can not simulate the same physical and environmental conditions to reconstruct the Martian environment, I mean such traits like Martian microgravitation or radiation exposure," Konrad Szocik, a cognitive scientist at the University of Information Technology and Management in Rzeszow, Poland and lead author of the paper, said in an e-mail. "Consequently, we cannot predict physical and biological effects of humans living on Mars."

He argues that "an awareness of the one-way journey and all possible dangers" cannot be simulated on the ISS, or even in Antarctica, one of the most remote places on Earth and a frequently cited zone in space analog studies. Szocik argues that people in Antarctica are not reliant on artificial life support to the degree that astronauts are.

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Szocik suggest individuals acclimatized to living in harsh conditions would be best suited for exploration of Mars. So that's not to say that the space station or Antarctica wouldn't be useful locations for training. But, he argues, it may be necessary to go a step further - modify people's bodies and minds ahead of journeying to Mars.

He suggests possibly electronically enhancing the human senses or prescribing medication that might help diminish emotional reactions in a moment a crisis. Of course, how exactly to do this still lies mostly in science fiction.

Szocik says he is greatly concerned with how a Martian colony would function. While most discussions of colonies focus on the technological or financial challenges of constructing and maintaining it, there has been less study of the social aspects of putting people within a Martian colony.

"A human being is a social animal and he lives in a group," he said. "Group problems affect many challenges and troubles, and we should consider now how we can prevent such typical human problems like conflicts, wars, cheating, etc."

Szocik is also concerned about reproduction on Mars, which not only needs a technological and medical support system, but a large enough colony to avoid the risk of inbreeding. He suggests a population of at least 500 adults on the surface. Not only that, but medical officials would should consider how to reduce the likely mortality rate from disease, possible technological failures, and radiation from the Martian environment, among other factors, he said.

Szocik's previously written about how religion would function on Mars and how the human psyche might be impacted. first foray into predicting human behavior on Mars.

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Colonizing Mars Might Require Humans to Radically Alter Their Bodies and Minds

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In 2016, two astronauts finished nearly a year of work on the International Space Station. NASA's Scott Kelly and Russia's Mikhail Kornienko were studied closely for changes in their physical and psychological health. NASA touts the mission as part of its "Journey to Mars", in which it hopes to send humans to the Red Planet by the 2030s.

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This article talks about how, when en route to or already on Mars, humans may become homesick or scared. The main issues are fear of leaving Earth, wanting valued items from Earth with them on Mars, and the colonists developing mental disorders.

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Imagine you are on the crew of a Mars mission and you fall out with a fellow crew member. You can't walk away from them. Imagine you are on the surface of Mars and you suffer terrible home sickness. You can't simply fly back to your family. Imagine there is a medical emergency in your team en-route to the Red Planet. You can't call emergency services, you're on your own. These issues with long-period missions into space, especially on future missions to colonize Mars, could cause serious psychological issues and may jeopardise the mission. Many groups are currently working on understanding how humans could react in these situations when they are isolated and confined so far away from home, and "Mars Analogues" based here on Earth are proving to be very useful...

It may seem obvious that it is going to be mentally (let alone physically) tough for future astronauts on the first manned missions to Mars, but space organizations (like NASA and ESA) and voluntary groups such as the Mars Society are gaining a valuable insight to how we function when restricted to very confined spaces with only a handful of people for company. Mars settlement mock-ups known as "Mars analogue environments" based in locations like the Utah Desert or the Arctic island of Spitsbergen are extremely valuable to mission planners when researching how to live and work on the Martian surface. However, they are also proving to be very influential when selecting crew members who will spend all of their time together. This psychological factor may be key to the future of Mars missions that could last years.

Plans are afoot for a long 520-day mock Mars mission this year to study the effects isolation has on a group of 12 volunteers. The study is being carried out by ESA and the Russian Institute of Biomedical Problems so psychological issues can be identified and understood. It is work like this on Earth that will influence the selection of astronauts to be sent to Mars who are compatible in a work and social environment.

A lot of research has been done on astronauts ever since Yuri Gagarin was launched into orbit alone in 1961. Before Gagarin's historic journey, doctors were very concerned that weightlessness may cause acute mental disorders such as schizophrenia. Fortunately, this was not to be the case, but there are many disorders we cannot fully test until man ventures far into interplanetary space.

It seems natural that Mars astronauts will want gifts, luxuries and other "reminders from home", as is possible on the International Space Station, but they will be totally isolated with no ferrying of items when they leave the safety of Earth. This need can be subdued by regular communications with home (although a 40+ minute delay for communications between Earth and Mars will make any "live" conversation impossible), and generally we know the problems we'll face should these "homesick" feelings surface.

But what happens when man loses sight of Earth? Dr. Nick Kanas, who has studied astronaut psychology at UC San Francisco, is concerned about this unknown factor. He has even given this situation a name: the "Earth out of view" phenomenon.

" Nobody in the history of mankind has ever experienced the Earth as a pale, insignificant blue dot in the sky. What that might do to a crew member, nobody knows. " - Dr. Nick Kanas.

This is the nature of the task in hand, humans are going to be pushed beyond what we would consider to be a "natural" situation. Perhaps we might surprise ourselves and find that space exploration is as natural to us as it was for our ancestors to discover new continents. In fact, many astronaut psychologists are looking back into the history books to gain an insight as to what it was like for early pioneers of global exploration.

" When early explorers left their home countries on the seas, they didn't see their home countries anymore. They didn't even have a dot to look at. It was out of sight on the other side of the world. It is not like we are reinventing the wheel. We are just doing the same thing in a different environment that was just as demanding then." - Walter Sipes, NASA psychologist, Johnson Space Center, Houston.

These factors combined with space euphoria and the "Overview Effect", our future Mars astronauts are possibly in for a bumpy psychological ride...

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Mars Settlement Pioneers Will Face Huge Psychological Challenges - Universe Today

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Imagine you are on the crew of a Mars mission and you fall out with a fellow crew member. You can't walk away from them. Imagine you are on the surface of Mars and you suffer terrible home sickness. You can't simply fly back to your family.

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This is a article on a study to see what the long term effect of isolation on a mars like area with strangers would do to the humans. The study will involve four months of mars related tasks and other things related to mars life

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There are three men and three women participating in this second HI-SEAS mission-a purposely tiny group selected out of a group of 700 applicants-and they include, among others, a neuropsychologist, an aerospace engineer, and an Air Force veteran who is studying human factors in aviation. The team will share a 1,000-square-foot habitat that is shaped like a dome. They will do so ... for four months. (Consider that for a second: living with five other people-strangers. For four months. In what amounts to a high-tech yurt.)

"We're going to stress them," Kim Binsted, the project's principal investigator, told the Hawaii Tribune-Herald. "That's the nature of the study."

Indeed. That test involves isolating the crew in the same way they'd be isolated on Mars. The only communication they'll be allowed with the outside world-that is to say, with their family and friends-will be conducted through email. (And that will be given an artificial delay of 20 minutes to simulate the lag involved in Mars-to-Earth communications.) If that doesn't seem too stressful, here's another source of stress: Each mission member will get only eight minutes of shower time ... per week. The stressfulness of which will be compounded by the fact that the only time the crew will be able to leave their habitat-yurt is when they're wearing puffy, insulated uniforms that simulate space suits. In the Hawaiian heat.

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There are three men and three women participating in this second HI-SEAS mission-a purposely tiny group selected out of a group of 700 applicants-and they include, among others, a neuropsychologist, an aerospace engineer, and an Air Force veteran who is studying human factors in aviation.