Hitehouse

It’s the most dangerous journey humanity has ever faced... but we will have pulled it off by 2061

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A long overdue return to the Moon is one thing, striking new ground on Mars is another. Despite what SpaceX owner Elon Musk, pictured below, says about sending thousands of people to Mars in just a few years, realistically it will be the late 2030s before humans set out for the red planet, and it will be the most dangerous journey ever undertaken. The problem is not Mars itself.We understand Mars, even if we don’t yet know if there is a lowly form of life there.

We have sent many probes there. We know what the surface is like, what the rocks are made of, what features it has. We know the composition, pressure and temperature of the atmosphere and we will soon know how to extract oxygen from its thin atmosphere. What we don’t know is how to get there safely.

Using current rockets, it would take about nine months, so a round-trip and a brief stay would mean humans would have to endure a 20-month mission. Lack of gravity is a major problem. People are not designed to live in space and returning astronauts who have spent more than a year on the International Space Station have shown how severe the effects are on the human body. There is much work to be done but at the moment medics say that astronauts, having travelled to Mars, would be in no fit state to land safely.

In Space 2069 I contend that it will be essential to design an interplanetary transfer craft with a rotating section so that its occupants can have some gravity to alleviate the effects of its absence.

But it is not just the lack of gravity that interplanetary voyagers face. There is radiation from deep space and from our Sun.

THE spacecraft will have to be shielded and have solar storm shelters for we do not really know what our Sun could throw at astronauts in deep space far from the protection of the Earth’s magnetic field.

The crew itself will have to be carefully chosen and monitored for they will be living in close proximity to each other farther away from Earth than anyone ever has.

To keep them alive they will need a completely closed life support system including almost total recycling.

To put it bluntly, if the urine processing facility fails the crew are dead.

Imagine setting off for Mars. Climbing into a spacecraft that will be your home for years. When the rockets are fired to leave the Earth the abort options rapidly reduce to zero. In other words, within a

VISIONS OF THE FUTURE: The Curiosity Mars rover; above, concept for a Moon base; and, left, astronaut exercises on the International Space Station

few hours even when you are still relatively close to home you cannot turn around and are committed to the voyage. No people in history will be so isolated, travelling 400 times further away from Earth than the Moon, so far that a radio signal would take between six and 44 minutes to get to Earth and the reply to return. But if we can overcome these problems, a magnificent world stands before us.

Mars is not a variant on the Earth, it is an alien world. The Moon is an outrigger world, Mars is the first true world of the cosmos. Satellites orbiting it, and rovers traversing it, show us it had a wet and warm past

In fact, billions of years ago, the Earth and Mars may have been similar. But while the Earth started the path towards the pleasant planet it is today, Mars took a different course, probably because it was smaller and soon lost its protective magnetic field. It became cold, almost all of its atmosphere was lost and the oceans froze becoming underground glaciers.

Evidence for Mars’ wetter past is everywhere.There are vast canyons made by raging torrents that dwarf anything found on Earth. Dried-up riverbeds meander from the highlands to the lowlands, breaches in crater walls show where they were breached, letting the water inside them cascade across the surface, gouging out similar features to those we see on Earth.

Scientists are particularly interested in the places where water left deposits such as clay. It is in such places where life may have started, and may now be hanging on, waiting for the warmer and wetter times that will never return. In my book, I place the first human footprints on Mars in the early 2040s. It could be later for there will undoubtedly be disasters and setbacks along the way, as there have always been with space exploration.

So where will we be 100 years after Neil Armstrong’s “small step?”

We will be sharing our space exploration with artificial intelligences – robots that can roll, crawl, swim and fly.

They will go where humans cannot. They will look like drones, spiders, beachballs, wheels, and they are all programmed to move, sense and move again. They will be let loose on the Moon, scattered all over Mars, dropped into the smoggy atmosphere of Titan, stuck to asteroids, thrown into comets.

ONE hundred years after Apollo 11, humans will have visited all the worlds we can. At this moment there are active volcanoes on Venus; briny water flowing on Mars; methane rain falling on Saturn’s moon Titan; hot vents at the bottom of a dark ocean inside Jupiter’s moon Europa; ice forming at the Martian poles; geysers on Enceladus, a moon of Saturn, and Triton, a moon of Neptune.

There are caverns on the Moon; astronauts on the space station, rovers on Mars; strange alien volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon Io.

Today, the first person who will go to Mars is almost certainly in college now. In 2069 the Earth will be in the evening sky of Mars, and someone will be looking at Mother Earth through a telescope.

●●Space 2069: After Apollo, Back To The Moon, To Mars, And Beyond by DavidWhitehouse (Icon Books, £16.99) is out now. For free UK delivery, call Express Bookshop 01872 562310 or order via expressbookshop.co.uk