Life on Mars
The race to populate the Red Planet is picking up speed as private enterprises get in on the action, writes Nigel Henbest
Bas Lansdorp gazed in awe at the landscape of Mars when the images came back: American space agency Nasa’s latest mission had just revealed a blood-red world scattered with boulders, dunes sculpted by ferocious winds and hills beckoning on the horizon. “The images of Sojourner on TV inspired me,” he recalls. “I thought: ‘I want to go there.’” There was one big problem, though: Nasa had calculated the cost of a human mission to Mars at US$500 billion. It was clearly a non-starter even for the agency’s astronauts, let alone private citizens.
But that was in 1997, when Lansdorp was an engineering student at the Netherlands’ University of Twente. Fastforward 16 years and the world of Mars exploration has been turned on its head. The first people to reach the Red Planet may not be astronauts from any government space agency but private individuals. Two companies – Mars One, which is headed by Lansdorp, and Inspiration Mars – this year announced plans to take volunteers to Mars at least a decade earlier than any government mission.
Can they pull it off? Plenty of people are taking them seriously. “These ideas are right,” says Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon. “And they will go a long way towards increasing enthusiasm for missions to Mars.”
The first cracks in Nasa’s monopoly of Mars exploration appeared in the 1990s, when Robert Zubrin, then an aerospace engineer at American corporation Martin Marietta, studied its ambitious plan, known as the Space Exploration Initiative. “It made no sense to me,” he recalls, “because it’s not the way we’ve explored Earth. When we’ve done it intelligently, it’s by living off the land.”
Zubrin, who today heads the Mars Society, came up with a solution. His Mars Direct proposal calls for a simple two-spacecraft mission. The first would land robotically and create fuel from the Martian air. Four astronauts would then set off in a second capsule; once landed, they would explore the surface and return in the other fuelledup rocket. The plan whittled the costs down to US$50 billion – half the cost of building and operating the International Space Station (ISS).
But Nasa focused its sights on the ISS. Even when United States President Barack Obama took up the banner for human missions beyond the moon in 2010, the priority was to send astronauts to an asteroid by 2025, with a mission to Mars and back “by the 2030s”.
Then along came the private sector. Most notable are the individuals who are paying for a ride to the ISS.