mars

Issue #44

Last Update March 2, 2006

National Going to Mars by Sten Grynir The Chinese government has accomplished something that no one in the US has been able to do: convince the government to seriously consider funding a moon base and manned Mars mission. China's recent success in manned space flight, plus its announced goal of landing a man on the moon, has relit the fires of international rivalry doused since the Soviet Union lost the space race.

American, European, Russian and Japanese space efforts have been focused on economically or scientifically useful near-earth endeavors, complicated by the heavy investment in an awkward and overpriced space shuttle. The tasks of manned exploration and settlement, which played such a large part in exploration of our planet, have been completely neglected in the space efforts of the past thirty-odd years. With China's announcement of a lunar goal, however, human exploration is back in play, albeit for the wrong reasons.

Unmanned missions can tell us a lot about where we are going, but it doesn't get us there. Human exploration is dangerous and expensive, but human explorers have always been willing to face the dangers, and ways have always been found to defray the expenses. A base on the moon is a prerequisite for human exploration of the rest of the solar system, providing raw materials and a lower gravity well to climb out of. The emotional payback is present: it continues humankind's greatest adventure. What is lacking is the identification of sufficient economic payback. Where are the gold and spices that motivated Renaissance explorers to round the Cape or head across the Atlantic? Where are the slaves that Spain and Portugal took from Africa and the Caribbean to do the work that fueled the Iberian economy?

There are minerals and water to be found on the planets and asteroids, but these may only become economically useful in space, or when our own planet has become so depleted that high costs are not an obstacle. Energy is the short-term economic payback; renewable, undepletable energy, from the sun, from the magnetic fields of some of the planets, from the methane and other gases that make up the bulk of the giant planets. We have the technology even now to collect this energy; the problems to be solved all involve transporting it back to Earth. These are finite, solvable problems.

In the meantime there is the payback of the Grand Adventure, the smashing of boundaries, the pushing back of horizons. Humans have always needed to see what’s over the next mountain. The need is still there. The next mountain is the Solar System.