Businessman gets serious about Mars travel

Buzz Aldrin has a clear motive for getting to Mars in a hurry: July 20, 2019 is the 50th anniversary of his Apollo 11 mission to the moon. The year 2040 had previously been mentioned as a possible timeframe for a manned mission to the red planet, but politics and technology make such predictions very fluid. Whatever the date, there’s an emerging consensus that Mars should be our next destination for human exploration.

This week, Elon Musk unveiled an audacious plan to have us colonizing Mars within a decade. His company, SpaceX, will provide the means for us to do so: the Interplanetary Transportation System. Musk is proposing a new series of large, modern, and reusable rockets that will ferry astronauts into Earth orbit, return to the launch site to pickup more fuel, and return to orbit to join the spaceship for a continuing journey to Mars. SpaceX has already demonstrated it can stick landings of their current rockets, so it’s not too difficult to imagine them taking this approach to the next level.

The Interplanetary Transportation System still has a number of significant technical challenges. For example, the engines on the current Falcon 9 rocket are not powerful enough to get a ship to Mars. But SpaceX is already testing their next engines, called Raptor, which will be used on the Mars spacecraft – 42 of them at once, in fact. Ultimately, we’ll need something even faster to get beyond Mars.

There are also issues related to radiation, food, and the effects of long-term isolation on humans living off world. We’ve been studying these problems for years, but we’ll never really know how to solve them until we actually experience something like a trip to Mars (and back). The movie “The Martian” was full of amazing science, but a lot of it was still “CSI”-like fictional.

Musk’s vision is to provide the opportunity for all of us to participate in space travel and ultimately experience life on another planet. NASA has led the way towards this goal for decades, and it continues to play an extremely important part in the overall mission to explore our solar neighborhood. But there’s a clear increase in the role of private enterprise when it comes to space, and that’s probably a good thing. We need thought leaders like Musk, Bezos, and Branson to provide inspiration to the next generation of scientists and engineers to get involved in this amazing race.

Motive. Means. Opportunity. It seems like we have everything we need to commit the perfect caper: be the first humans to colonize Mars. As Musk said, “Let’s make life interplanetary!”

Scott Tilley is a professor at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne. Contact him at TechnologyToday@srtilley.com.