No Man's Land: Where on Mars Should Astronauts Go?

Mining & Minerals - Evaluations / Off-World Exploration, Mining, & Technology

Date posted: 03/09/16

Lee Billings reports that The Martians invaded Houston one morning in October of last year, although in truth some of them already lived there. As home to the NASA astronaut corps at Johnson Space Center and the NASA-funded Lunar and Planetary Institute, Houston probably has the highest per capita density of aspiring Martians on Earth. The rest of the Martians were a group of scientists, engineers, physicians and bureaucrats who came from around the country and even the globe to fill the Institute auditorium for a historic workshop. They all were there to discuss their common dream ... sending human beings to the freeze-dried desert planet right next door that, outside of our own, remains the most hospitable world in the known universe. Some 20 years from now, if current timelines are to be trusted, that dream will at last become a reality. Housed in a crew capsule called Orion, NASA astronauts will soar into orbit on an advanced version of the Space Launch System, a rocket bigger than the Saturn 5 that took their predecessors to the moon. In orbit they will dock with other spacecraft, including a deep-space habitat, then fly away, leaving Earth far behind. Months later they will arrive at Mars, descending to the planet in a habitat lander. They will spend hundreds of days on the surface constructing a base, exploring their surroundings and manufacturing rocket fuel. At the end of their stay, that rocket fuel will power a Mars Ascent Vehicle, which will launch those first pioneers back to the deep-space habitat and then to Earth. The base will remain for use and expansion by future crews as part of a broader Evolvable Mars Campaign. All told, the first round-trip journey will probably take about three years and will be part of a larger program costing several hundreds of billions of dollars. NASA is already working feverishly on this grand endeavor ... 20 years, it turns out, is not a lot of time to prepare for an expedition to another planet.