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ide of nasa the mars faith shades darker it is part of a transhumanist worldview that holds mankind must either spread to the stars or die elon musk the martian spiritual leader has talked about the need to preserve the light of consciousness by making us a multiplanetary species as he sees it mars is our only way off of a planet crawling with existential risk and it s not just enough to explore mars we have make it a backup for all civilization failing to stock it with subsistence farming incels would be tantamount to humanity lying down in its open grave that is some heavy stuff to lay on a small rocky world i think it s time we brought the mars talk down to earth and started approaching a landing there as an aerospace project rather than the fulfillment of god s plan but so far public discourse on mars has mostly been about whose rocket is bigger and which billionaire can get his up the fastest since we re already paying for this program why not look at it in more detail it s pretty clear what a mars mission would look like how long it would take and where the big technology gaps are we ve learned a great deal about mars itself and have twenty years of iss technical reports to work from so let s have ourselves a good old fashioned nerdfight in what follows i want to lay out the case against mars in more technical detail than i ve been able to find elsewhere then we can argue about it online on the merits like space nerds used to the argument i ll make has three parts 1 research astronaut karen nyberg performs an eye exam on the iss in 2013 the things that make going to mars hard are not fun space things like needing a bigger rocket but tedious limits of human physiology understanding these limits well enough to get to mars will require years of human experiments beyond low earth orbit 43 in particular we need preliminary data on the physiological effects of partial gravity 44 and a better estimate of the risk from heavy ion radiation 45 since core tradeoffs around crew safety depend on the outcome these experiments have to be done before nasa can finalize a mission design absent a miracle in appropriations the only practical place to do this research will be on the moon 46 this puts a working lunar base on the critical path to a mars landing and means any delay or snag in nasa s artemis program automatically pushes back the earliest date for a mars landing this research gap is what makes it impossible to get to mars quickly even with unlimited funding 47 unless you re willing to risk the safety of the crew there s no way to avoid watching astronauts sit around on the moon for a few years with their geiger counters out 2 engineering italian astronaut samantha cristoforetti tests isspresso her country s contribution to the iss life support system in 2015 the chief technical obstacle to a mars landing is not propulsion but a lack of reliable closed loop life support 48 with our current capability nasa would struggle to keep a crew alive for six months on the white house lawn let alone for years in a martian yurt the technology program required to close this gap would be remarkably circular with no benefits outside the field of applied zero gravity zookeeping the web of rube goldberg devices that recycles floating animal waste on the space station has already cost twice its weight in gold 49 and there is little appetite for it here on earth where plants do a better job for free i would compare keeping primates alive in spacecraft to trying to build a jet engine out of raisins both are colossal engineering problems possibly the hardest ever attempted but it does not follow that they are problems worth solving in both cases the difficulty flows from a very specific design constraint and it s worth revisiting that constraint one or ten times before starting to perform miracles of engineering what makes life support so vexing is that all the subcomponents interact with each other and with the crew there s no such thing as a life support unit test you have to run the whole system in space under conditions that mimic the target mission reliability engineering for life support involves solving mysteries like why gunk formed on a certain washer on day 732 then praying on the next run that your fix doesn t break on day 733 the process repeats until the first crew makes it home alive figuratively speaking at which point you declare the technology reliable and chill the champagne unlike the medical research there s no way to predict how long these trials might take a typical exploration profile 50 needs two different kinds of life support for the spacecraft and the surface that together have to work for about 1000 days the spacecraft also has to demonstrate that it can go dormant for the time the crew is on mars and still work when it wakes up twenty years of tinkering with the much simpler systems on the space station have brought them no closer to reliability and yet to get a crew to mars we d need to get this stuff working like a swiss watch humanity does not need a billion dollar shit dehydrator that can work for three years in zero gravity but a mars mission can t leave earth without it 3 contamination debris left by the perserverance landing photographed in april 2022 by the ingenuity helicopter humans who land on mars will not be able to avoid introducing a large ecosystem of microbes to the area around the landing site if any fugitives from the spacecraft make their way to a survivable niche on mars we may never be able to tell whether biotic signatures later found on the planet are traces of native life or were left by escapees from our first martian outhouse like careless investigators who didn t wear gloves to a crime scene we would risk permanently destroying the evidence we came to collect no exploration without contamination would be a good phrase to stencil in red letters above the airlock ideally before welding it shut contamination risk is a real showstopper for mars one of those problems that gets worse the more carefully you look at it it should put the planet off limits to human explorers until we re either sure that there is no pathway from the spacecraft to a habitable martian environment or are confident for other reasons that the consequences don t matter 51 even the astronaut corps recognizes that exploring mars and keeping it pristine are irreconcilable activities like trying to drill for oil in a cleanroom the problem goes beyond practical questions like how to store 17 months of astronaut shit and gets to the crux of the matter why is bringing a leaky bacteria filled terrarium to mars step one 52 in our search for martian life what incredible ability do astronauts have that justifies taking this risk skeptics point out that earth microbes have already landed on mars both on robotic landers 53 and the occasional meteorite but as we ll see the diverse microbiome that would travel with a human crew poses a qualitatively different threat 54 and would have a far better chance of getting settled on mars than the sad loners clinging to rovers like curiosity even if you don t care about contamination nasa is required by treaty to care 55 and that has severe consequences for mission design it means human landing sites will intentionally be kept far from anything interesting the phenomena of greatest scientific interest on mars gullies recurrent slope lineae intermittent methane sources and underground water will all be off limits to astronauts so will terrain features like caves or lava tubes that could conceivably shelter life the crew will not live in a martian pueblo but something resembling a level 4 biocontainment facility 56 and even there they ll have to do their lab work remotely the same way it s done today raising the question of what exactly the hundreds of billions of dollars we re spending to get to mars are buying us ice near ultimi scopuri esa mars express 2022 that s my case against mars in a nutshell it comes front loaded with expensive research the engineering is mostly port a potty chemistry and the best case outcome is that thirty years from now we ll get to watch someone remotely operate a soil scoop from mars instead of pasadena i understand not wanting to let go of a cherished dream but i also have a cherished dream which is to see space exploration happen in my lifetime and it is hard to overlook that the 93 billion 57 nasa has already spent through 2025 to not land anyone on the moon would be enough 58 to send probes to every world in the solar system including moons we know have oceans of liquid water 59 and two entire planetary systems that haven t been visited since voyager 2 gave them a quick once over in the 1980 s 60 and let s not forget mars for my part i would love to know what causes recurrent slope lineae why there is methane at gale crater and whether anything is swimming in the subsurface lakes discovered in 2018 orbiters have already found dozens of creepy caves and pits any one of which would be worth looking into and the discovery that mars is geologically active should inspire a search for life deep underground exploring these environments remotely won t be easy but whatever technology we invent to do it will pay dividends on missions across the solar system polar dunes showing carbon dioxide frost and sublimation phenomena hirise 2007 on this planet we believe in science we re at a rare moment when the united states is in between white elephant space projects the iss is nearing the end of its life 61 and tensions between nasa and roscosmos have filled all hearts with hope that we can soon drop the thing into the ocean for the first time since nixon americans have a chance to choose a bolder future for their space program one path forward would be to build on the technological revolution of the past fifty years and go explore the hell out of space with robots this future is available to us right now simply redirecting the 11 6 billion budget 62 for human space flight would be enough to staff up the jet propulsion laboratory and go from launching one major project per decade to multiple planetary probes and telescopes a year 63 it would be the start of the greatest era of discovery in history a different path forward would take us to mars the slow dangerous and hard way it would take decades and cost hundreds of billions of dollars it requires developing a solipsistic technology that can t take us anywhere else except venus 64 and it is not guaranteed to work if there s a reason this plan is better than going exploring nasa should articulate it to the people who are going to be paying the bill nasa has spent decades learning how to survive in the harsh environment of congress and that knowledge is bearing fruit today the machinery that brought us two pointless multibillion dollar space projects has been spun up again to take us to mars like george lucas preparing to release another awful prequel nasa is hoping that cool spaceships and nostalgia will be enough to keep everyone from noticing that their story makes no sense but you can t lie your way to mars no matter how sincerely you believe in what you re doing the other mars program mere failure to realize a long term aspirational goal is not fraud lawyers representing tesla november 2022 of course in 2022 there is an alternative vision for mars exploration centered on the activities of elon musk if nasa is amtrak in space then spacex is the fyre festival with rockets a glamorous effort led by a hype man who promises that every logistical problem will melt away if we can just get people to the destination what can i say about musk he likes rockets and drama and his approach to every engineering problem is to promise to solve it with cool technology that he ll have ready in q2 of next year this has the effect of turning technical discussions into debates over the character and achievements of elon musk just the way he likes it spacex has built some magnificent rockets and their dynamism is a welcome change from the souls trapped in powerpoint vibe at nasa if their founder were anyone else spacex s incredible track record of achievement would force us to take their mars plan 65 seriously but their founder is who he is and what he has publicly shared is not so much a blueprint as an inspirational poster musk s vision for the company hinges on a reusable rocket called starship which will be able to do everything refuel in space re enter either the martian or earth atmosphere land on the moon make an amazing cup of coffee economies of scale will make this rocket so cheap that it will soon cost less to launch things into space than to keep them on earth at that point moving to mars will just be a matter of buying a second hand starship and filling it with monster energy drinks and oxygen the difficult and unglamorous problems of a mars mission how do you wash your socks what is there to eat get no love from elon once you get beyond rocket factory go brrrrr there is no plan just a familiar fog of musky woo the mars rockets will refuel from autonomous robot factories powered by sunlight their crews will be shielded from radiation by some form of electromagnetic handwaving life support the hardest practical problem in space travel is actually quite easy and of course musk dismisses the problem of microbial contamination which i can t emphasize enough is governed by international treaty as both inevitable and no big deal but spacex is ultimately in the business of building rockets not zoo enclosures and as any tesla owner can attest slowly working the bugs out of a life critical technology is not what keeps the world s most distractible ceo entertained in the end there are just two organizations roscosmos and nasa that have deep enough expertise in life support to make it work on mars length missions spacex will either have to find a way to work with them or hire away 66 their experts if you have faith in musk there s nothing i can say to shake it but if you notice a pattern in his past promises the hypertunnel that is just a regular tunnel the door panels that fall off the self driving car the robot that s only a guy in a suit then maybe you ll be persuaded that firing difficult problems into space does not make them easier and that the challenges i ll lay out here will apply no matter whose name is on the rocket wherever you stand on the matter whether you re a musk fanboy an unaligned mars obsessive or just biplanetary curious i invite you to come imagine with me what it would take and what it would really mean for people to go put their footprints in the martian sand next week the shape of a mars mission footnotes 1 i ll justify this figure in detail later on for now consider that each sls launch costs 4 2b and that developing just the orion space capsule has cost 20b the iss which is functionally close to a mars transfer vehicle has so far cost 250 billion 2 this is the date you get when you add the minimum time requir...
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