Sky and Telescope - June 2016 - 84

Focal Point

Jim Bell

Getting Humans to Mars
Has this become inevitable, even imminent?
administrations have oﬃcially adopted
human exploration of Mars as a major
goal for NASA's near-term future. And
judging from my experience talking with
students, news media, and general audiences, the public has also accepted this
idea. Average people are excited about
robotic research but also realize that the
biggest leaps in the scientiﬁc reconnaissance of Mars will need to be made by the
men and women who go there and share
their stories and discoveries with the rest
of us back home.
The second big change is the recent
emergence of practical, aﬀordable, and
sustainable plans to begin to send astronauts to the Red Planet. This is not just for
a short, one-oﬀ "ﬂags-and-footsteps" mission. Rather it's part of a longer-term strategy to develop a scientiﬁc research outpost
there and, perhaps, even a settlement.
The Planetary Society recently pitched

one of these plans as part of its "Humans
Orbiting Mars" initiative (hom.planetary.
org). The proposal details how NASA's
new Space Launch System rockets, Orion
crew capsules, and Deep Space Habitation
modules would ﬁrst demonstrate the ability to get a crew to Mars orbit in the early
2030s. A series of Mars crew landings
would follow starting in the late 2030s.
The basic premise of that plan, which
can realistically ﬁt within NASA's existing budget (if it keeps up with inﬂation),
is similar to the logic behind the Apollo
8 mission: build missions incrementally,
validating pieces like long interplanetary
cruises and orbiting Mars ﬁrst, then later
add the complexities of landing and ascent.
Another of these plans, still in its
infancy, comes courtesy of SpaceX and
its visionary CEO Elon Musk. Musk's
personal goal, and the driver behind all of
SpaceX's rocketry and other research, is
"enabling people to live on other planets"
and speciﬁcally to begin the colonization of Mars. While the timeline for the
company's Mars plans remains unclear,
SpaceX has certainly shown an impressive, rapidly attained level of technical
prowess and public interest. It might
actually have the ability to send people to
Mars in the late 2020s or early 2030s.
The huge popularity of the recent book
and ﬁ lm The Martian is not a random
occurrence. Rather it is a manifestation of
an idea whose time has come. Dispatching people to Mars is no longer science
ﬁction but instead a reality that will come
true in the very near future. ✦
© BIGSTOCKPHOTO.COM

Ever since I was a kid, it's seemed
like sending astronauts to Mars has
always been 30 years away. Over the past
half century, NASA and other agencies
and organizations have commissioned
dozens of studies about this grand goal,
with landing dates variously between
the 1970s and 2040s. Of course, none of
those missions have come to pass (except
in sci-ﬁ movies). Recently, however, two
big changes have, perhaps ﬁnally, made
human missions to Mars not only practical but also possibly imminent.
The ﬁrst is the widespread acceptance
that visiting Mars in person is not just a
fanciful idea but is actually inevitable in
the near future. The scientiﬁc community
has begun to align aspects of the ongoing robotic Mars survey program toward
experiments and technologies that could
directly beneﬁt future human missions.
Multiple Congresses and Presidential

June 2016 sky & telescope

Contributing Editor Jim Bell is an astronomer at Arizona State University, author
most recently of The Interstellar Age, and
president of The Planetary Society.

http://www.BIGSTOCKPHOTO.COM

Sky and Telescope - June 2016

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