We must act with purpose, wisdom, and courage. The Martian/20th Century Fox
In his speech to Congress last month, President Donald Trump promised to “lead humanity into space and plant the American flag on the planet Mars and even far beyond”. His claim is not serious, as Trump is far too busy wrecking the global liberal order to achieve such a splendid feat. And even if he weren’t, there’s no way we can reach Mars in the next four years. Nevertheless, it is possible that the new administration, under the eye of SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, will make human travel to Mars the main goal of NASA.
The Emperor and Darth Vader may be wrong about a lot of things, but they are not wrong about this. NASA needs a purpose, one that’s worthy of the costs and risks of human spaceflight. That goal can only be sending humans to Mars. This is so because Mars is where the science is, Mars is where the challenge is, and Mars is where the future is.
Let’s start with the science. In the beginning, the Earth and Mars were twins. Both were warm, wet, rocky planets with atmospheres dominated by carbon-dioxide — then, Earth evolved life. If the theory is correct, and life emerges naturally from chemistry whenever the conditions are right, then life should have evolved on Mars too, and on millions of other planets throughout our galaxy. If we find evidence of past or present life on Mars, it means we are not alone.
There are other reasons to explore Mars. Biotechnology is going to be one of the main engineering sciences of the 21st century and many to follow. If we find life on Mars, we will be able to discover whether the DNA-RNA information system utilised by all life on Earth is universal, or whether it is just one of many possibilities. A different system could offer revolutionary engineering possibilities, as great in comparison to DNA-RNA as silicon computers are to those based on vacuum tubes, electric relays or mechanical Babbage machines.
A humans-to-Mars programme would also inspire millions of young Americans to develop their scientific talents, generating vast amounts of intellectual capital. In the Sixties, the Apollo programme doubled the number of American science and engineering graduates, whose innovations (such as the computer revolution) have since repaid the nation the cost of the programme many times over. Like individuals, nations grow when they challenge themselves and stagnate when they do not.
The business-as-usual space establishment claims that its Artemis program, which aims for a return to the Moon, is comparable to a mission to Mars. But this is simply untrue. There are no questions of fundamental scientific interest that can be resolved by exploring the surface of the Moon. Nor will we astonish the world by repeating something we did more than half a century ago.
And then there’s the matter of humanity’s future. Of all the worlds currently within our reach, Mars is by far the most viable candidate for human settlement. The Red Planet offers new branches of human civilisation the chance to have a fresh start, in a place where the rules haven’t yet been written. Unlike the ultra-dry Moon, Mars has oceanic quantities of water, including vast amounts in liquid form deep underground, as well as massive ice glaciers containing as much water as the American Great Lakes. And while the Moon lacks any meaningful supply of carbon or nitrogen — elements essential for life — Mars has an atmosphere that is 95% carbon dioxide and 2.6% nitrogen. With plentiful CO2 and water, one can grow plants for food and fibre, and make plastics and fuels. Martian water is five times as rich as terrestrial water in deuterium, which is the fuel for fusion reactors. So once fusion power is mastered, Mars will offer infinite energy, allowing its settlers to transform its mineral wealth into steel, pipes, greenhouses, and cities. It will eventually become the natural takeoff point for expeditions to mine the precious metal riches of the asteroid belt.
For the coming age of space settlement, Mars compares to the Moon as North America compared to Greenland during the age of European maritime exploration. Greenland was closer to Europe, so the Europeans reached it first. But its environment was too impoverished to host more than a few outposts. America, by contrast, would become the home of a vibrant new branch of Western civilisation.
The Artemis programme’s lack of purpose is further demonstrated by its hardware set, composed as it is of tens of billions of dollars’ worth of random elements, including the SLS heavy-lift booster, the SpaceX Starship, the Orion capsule, the National Team expendable lunar lander, and a lunar orbiting space station called the Gateway, which together would not enable a coherent mission plan. In fact, most of these hardware elements only exist because there is a constituency that benefits from their funding. The Artemis programme is vendor-driven, not purpose driven. A purpose-driven programme spends money to achieve goals. A vendor-driven programme, like Artemis, does things in order to spend money. We can and must do better.
If America is to once again have a space programme worthy of a nation of pioneers, we must act with purpose, with wisdom, and with courage. After all, we are far better prepared today to send humans to Mars than we were in 1961 to meet President Kennedy’s call to send men to the Moon — and we were there eight years later. To shrink from this challenge would be to declare that we are no longer the people we used to be — and that is a concession America cannot afford to make.
Yet a Mars mission could easily be derailed. Trump and Musk have both defined themselves in hyper-partisan terms. But if the Mars programme is seen as a Trump-Musk hobby-horse, it will be cancelled as soon as the fortunes of political war shift, as they are certain to do long before the mission is realised. Therefore the proposals advanced by some in the Trump camp to give the programme to SpaceX to pursue outside of NASA are not merely unethical (as they would involve the sole-source distribution of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to Musk), but suicidally impractical. If the programme is to succeed, it must be in the name of America, not Elon Musk.
Furthermore, it needs to be done correctly. SpaceX’s Starship, which claims to be the world’s most powerful reusable launch vehicle, promises to be a terrific asset. But Musk insists that it should be the only vehicle used for the mission. While a Starship upper stage could be refuelled on orbit by tanker Starships, enabling it in theory to fly from Earth orbit to Mars, its 100-tonne mass makes it suboptimal for use as an ascent vehicle. It would make far more sense to develop and use a similar but much smaller vehicle — a “Starboat” if you will — to travel between the surface of Mars and its orbit. Starship plus Starboat could enable highly efficient missions to Mars. But this will require a programme leadership capable of speaking truth to power.
Technicalities aside, Musk’s vision of a Martian settlement is also seriously misconceived. He has propounded the idea that thousands of Starships should be used to rapidly land a million people on Mars to create a metropolis which will preserve “the precious light of consciousness” after the human race on Earth is destroyed in the near future (by asteroid impacts, nuclear war, runaway AI, or the woke mind virus — the plot line varies). The idea is apparently based on Isaac Asimov’s science fiction trilogy, Foundation, in which a group of scientists is sent to the far-flung planet Terminus (also Musk’s name for his colony), so that after the anticipated collapse of the galactic empire their descendants can emerge to reconstruct civilisation. It’s a grand read. But it is not applicable to the task at hand.
For one thing, you can’t just dump one million people on Mars. Starships will only be able to carry about 100 tonnes of cargo from Earth to Mars, and it will take six to eight months to perform the transit. This means that a Mars settlement of any size cannot be supported from Earth. Before large numbers of people go to the Red Planet, then, we’ll need to develop the agricultural and industrial base needed to feed, clothe, and house them. The settlement of Mars must therefore occur organically, as the settlement of America did, with small groups of pioneers creating the first farms and industries that provide the basis for supporting ever larger waves of settlers to follow.
Furthermore, as Musk should know, no million-person Mars outpost could possibly survive the collapse of human civilisation on Earth. Technological civilisation requires a vast division of labour. It is unlikely that a society of one million people could produce a good electric wristwatch, or even a wristwatch battery, let alone an iPhone. The high-tech components of Mars’s most advanced systems will need to be imported from Earth for a very long time.
And besides, the idea that a few will survive on Mars, while billions die on Earth is so morally repulsive that any programme foolish enough to adopt it would be doomed. Coated with ideological skunk essence, the mission’s protagonists would appear more like the selfish characters in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death, dancing in a castle while everyone outside dies in an epidemic, than the heroes of Foundation.
We should not go to Mars to desert humanity, but to strengthen humanity. The aim should be to vastly expand humanity’s power to meet all future challenges by making grand scientific discoveries — and yes, in the fullness of time, establishing new highly-inventive branches of civilisation. We should not go to Mars to preserve “the precious light of consciousness” in an off-world hideaway, as Musk would have it, but to liberate human minds by opening an unlimited frontier. We should not go to Mars to party while the Earth burns, but to prevent Earth from burning altogether by showing that there is no need to fight over provinces when by invoking our higher natures we can inhabit new planets. For by doing so, human freedom can expand into the cosmos.
That is the case for Mars.
Dr. Robert Zubrin is an aerospace engineer, president of the Mars Society and author of The Case for Mars and most recently of The New World on Mars: What We Can Create on the Red Planet.
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SubscribeFor anyone interested in the biological (as opposed to the engineering) limitations of space travel, the Guy Foundation’s “Space Report” is essential reading. The two astronauts who returned from the space station (which is within the earth’s orbit and therefore partially influenced by the earth’s magnetosphere) aged considerably during their 9 months in space. This appears to have been due to issues relating to the function of mitochondria (the “power stations” of our cells) in space. What appears to be the case, is that our mitochondria are very sensitively tuned to our environment. When we take them out of the environment they evolved in (i.e. down here on the crust of earth), they cease to function optimally. This then results in rapid aging. The long and short of it is that, compared to the immense engineering achievements required to send human beings to Mars, overcoming the biological constraints is significantly more onerous. And mitochondrial function is just one example of those constraints. Others include the evolution of microbes in space. We have evolved with trillions of commensurate microorganisms. New microorganisms are already being discovered at the space station, because microbes have quicker evolutionary processes than human beings. How will this limit our ability to live on Mars?
It seems that the discussion about going to mars is dominated by engineers, who have almost no knowledge of how biological systems function.
It is also frightening (in my opinion) that we are looking for “purpose” in (what appears to me to be) fantastical technological feats, rather than in the humble service of others. I suspect we will soon be reminded that humbly serving others is by far the most difficult thing we can achieve (as individuals and collectively) and that fantasies that distract us from that purpose imperil us all.
Please. Don’t let NASA get anywhere near Elon’s Occupy Mars project. I am sure that there are unimaginable problems yet to be encountered and eventually solved in the Occupy Mars project. But gubmint NASA is sure to botch it.
In just a few years Elon Musk was able to reduce by 90% the cost of going into space. There are a lot of things you can do in orbit/space without the constrains of gravity: communications, AI – microchips (under 1 nanometer), monoclonal antibodies, etc… Only this 3 things will completely reshape our lives and culture (for the best)
Maybe we want to avoid a cure for cancer just because it’s provided by Elon Musk?
What a strange article. The author wants to colonise Mars but seems to think that the wrong person may do it, or that they may have the wrong motivations, or that the act of doing so for the wrong motivation might increase the chances of making the earth uninhabitable.
It comes down to this: either Musk succeeds in doing this, or you can knock any plans of us going there back a few decades. Take it or leave it.
I think Musk should personally go to Mars tomorrow. Once he has done so, he can report back, and let us know how things are there.
You should go. You serve no useful purpose here.
Actually I’d say he mixes substance with trolllery, on an unpredictable “reward schedule”. That may be useful for those subscribers who don’t come to a place called UnHerd to find back-slapping loud agreement all the time.
Thank you, AJ Mac. That is a very perspicacious comment.
You got it, Martin. I aim for perspicacity, but keep bumping into things—often by accident.
I am quite happy being here, thanks. It is Musk who has the “vision” to go there, not me. My desire to visit another planet left me in about 1976.
. . . and stay there.
I wouldn’t do that! You’d miss me too much!
I think he should go there and stay there by himself.
Its a pity to see Zubrin attacking Musk like this, they were friends not so long ago. SAD
Good point! How could anybody ever fall out with Musk?
try reading the article again – his point is that if it becomes Musk’s pet project only, it will fall victim to the next turn of the political cycle, which is a perfectly valid point.
Perhaps Musk should try “re-sending” man to the moon before we try Mars?
Uhm, why must there be a “grand purpose to save the human race” in order to justify going to Mars?
Isn’t Mars a bit like Everest? Someone climbed it because it was there. I have a huge fourteener in my back yard. I can see why it would be very cool to get to the top of it and look around. Hell of a view I’ll bet.
What kind of disaster would have to befall the earth to render it less hospitable than Mars?
Nuclear war or even an asteroid strike comparable to the one that wiped out the dinosaurs would still leave us with a planet more suited to human life than Mars.
As on Mars, we’d have to live in enclosed environments, but at least we’d have plenty of water, oxygen, a magnetosphere and human-friendly gravity.
If it’s humanity’s survival we’re concerned about, we should build self-sustaining habitats underground and underwater before we try outer space.
But if we do want an off-world insurance policy, to guard against the sort of cataclysm that could wipe out all life on our planet (e.g. collision with an object so large that it shatters the Earth to pieces), our best bet is probably floating cities on Venus, which has gravity 90% of ours (Mars has just 40%, which would have interesting effects on human settlers).
Of all the comments to attract downvotes, this one surprises me.
I’d love for someone to elaborate.
I get that Mars could be a good source for natural resources, but the moon could also be valuable from that perspective.
There’s a separate question about where it makes sense to put colonies aimed at ensuring the human species survives. It’s not clear that 40% gravity is enough for us.
But the Moon is not valuable from a natural resources perspective. Zubrin covers that point in more detail in his book.
Unlike other comments thus far, which have tended to concentrate on the Musk/NASA issue, i think the author is trying to point us away from the immediacy of the persons/programmes involved in current Mars projects towards something far more fundamental – our humanity.
The survival of our species is essentially a spiritual issue (and i don’t mean religious, but spiritual in the wider sense… in my thinking, the more important sense). By that, i mean that we can have all the material goods and services we care to invent, but unless we have a sense of purpose, we will decline.
Musk at least has a sense of purpose, whether or not it’s viewed as ill-conceived. The rest of the space programme, in the US if not elsewhere (and it would’ve been interesting for the author to have touched on that perspective, e.g. India, China) just doesn’t seem to have that sense of purpose.
It’s the sense of purpose that sent the pioneers out West; the sense of purpose that sent European explorers across the globe. Human courage and curiosity, which then repays us in manifold ways through the advancement of science and technical prowess. What even drives us to venture over the nearest hill, in fact. This is the spirit that’s driven our civilisation to this point and the fact that something of it still burns in people like Musk should be celebrated, not mocked. Such people often appear as oddballs, slightly set apart from the crowd, but driving the “village loner” out and over the hill would only benefit wherever he or she found themselves.
I agree with some of your comment but I just don’t see how fixation on technological advancement or “growth” answers to our spiritual or higher needs. Or how Musk’s missions have much unselfishness in them. I think there’s something like a hubristic plan to actually live forever, even in “uploaded” form, in Musk.
The Wild West got better for future generations when we decided to stop cutting down all the forests and extracting high-dollar elements from the Earth with almost no restriction. For people like Musk—not that’s he’s a common breed—restrictions and limits are for other people.
Curiosity and the desire to conquer new ecological niches are the basic instincts of any species.
Granting that those things are part of mankind’s basic instincts—though not of any species—when those expansionist impulses run rampant it becomes base, in addition to basic.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t strive to reach Mars, but I hear some people using that quest as excuse to call the Earth doomed on some quick schedule, and pay little attention to our shared air, soil, and water. How many people can afford to join Musk on Mars?
Not only that, but what about the fact that we haven’t actually evolved? Our brains are the same as they always were and we still don’t know how to get on with each other. It’s like you take yourself wherever you go. If we go to Mars we’re going to screw it up as we’re still screwing it up here.
I thought that what sent European explorers across the globe was greed. Go . . . and get.
I am happy to celebrate the spirit, but I’ll continue to mock Musk, thanks.
We’d be foolish trust Elon Musk on all matters, but when it comes to getting men to Mars, I trust him more than Robert Zubrin.
Plans that seem inefficient in theory often work well in practice, thanks to simplicity and economies of scale.
There are good reasons, for example, that Starship is made from stainless steel, rather than the fancier materials that NASA historically favoured.
Zubrin is merely stating that the 100-tonne ship would not be useful for ‘ascent’, i.e. lift-off from Mars. It requires a lot of energy to propel a ship into orbit and mass is the problem.
The Starship can get “to Mars” but it cannot reasonably service facilities “on Mars.”
Maybe, but doesn’t Musk have every incentive to figure out efficiencies for himself?
Why do we need some NASA bureaucrat “capable of speaking truth to power’?
Musk does listen to Zubrin, SpaceX may have started thinking about using Methane because Zubrin suggested it in his Case for Mars book
Zubrin isn’t a NASA bureaucrat, which is a pity, he’d be perfect for the job. or he was until he turned on Musk
Colour me impressed. I thought it was going to be another Musk bashing. It was not. As Zubrin says, Mars is worth conquering but the current approaches need to be reconsidered.
I agree with Zubrin that a near-term Mars colony could not be fully self-sustaining even with one million people. However, that could change in the future. If we bring in advanced robotics, 3D printing, nanotechnology, and general-purpose AI, the required human labor could drop dramatically. If robotics reaches a point where 80–95% of labor is automated, the colony’s size could drop dramatically—potentially to 10,000–50,000 for a high-tech society, assuming Earth provides initial tech seeds (e.g., a starter chip fab).
It is 42 million miles to Mars at the closest point. We haven’t been back to the moon (250,000 miles) for fifty years. Without continuous space exploration since the 1970s it is frankly ludicrous to think that a manned mission to Mars will be possible this century.
The author sounds like he’s jealous of Musk, otherwise why the petty attack. Most Musk haters are grappling with the green eyed monster.
In fairness, Musk is about as hateable a person as there is going around right now.
I don’t hate him, and a lot of other people also don’t. This is your problem, not Elon Musk’s problem.
Musk is the last generation of people fascinated by space exploration. I’m afraid there’s zero appetite ( and resources) for exorbitantly expensive suicide missions.
To hell with the “global liberal order.” I’m glad to see it die a well-deserved death. It’s unsustainable in a fiscal way as well. Today’s prosperity is built on borrowed money that will never be paid back. Glad to see it die.
We’ll fight over the new planets, too, as we fight over Earth. It’s in our nature.
Fanciful article, ‘ if the theory is correct …….’ Too many unsupported presumptions about the origins of life and its reality anywhere apart from ‘the goldielocks zone’
“And besides, the idea that a few will survive on Mars, while billions die on Earth is so morally repulsive that any programme foolish enough to adopt it would be doomed.”
It’s not adopting the idea. It’s adapting to the risk of it. I’ve read enough of Musk’s views on the subject to know that this is what he really means. So the rest of the article, presented as a contrast with Musk’s ambitions, are actually merely in alignment with them.
And Musk’s ideas are not new, nor original to him. He’s approximately the same age as me and I presume he grew up surrounded by much the same big ideas about space, time and life that I and millions of others did. In particular that the idea of spaceship Earth is a nonsense: it’s lifeboat Earth, and the first priority of a technologically-advancing civilisation on a single planet is to distribute risk by becoming multiplanetary. Not just to save humanity, but as much of the rest of life on Earth as possible as well.
We have a billion years yet before the sun boils the oceans, so there’s plenty of time, but no harm starting now either.
We don’t yet have viable systems to live a self-sustained modern life in the Sahara or high Arctic.
All very interesting, but Elon Musk should be let nowhere near it. The idea of humanity’s future being the hands of that creepy weirdo is too awful to contemplate.
Wrong again Martin, how do you always manage to do it
Well, if you think Musk is “the future”, you are welcome to join him on his jaunt to Mars.
You’re a creepy jealous weirdo for posting as you do. What have you accomplished that could even compare to Musk. I’ll make a guess, not much.
You should tell your dad to kick his ass!
Well, I haven’t made a large percentage of the world’s population hate me, so I’m certainly behind him on that front. Not sure why he did that though….