Commercial space missions, colonies on Mars and finding a way for the tourists of the future to book round-trip flights to the Moon were among the out-of-this-world ideas being discussed by brainiacs yesterday at a Massachusetts Institute of Technology forum aimed at helping private companies get a foothold in what could be a budding multibillion dollar economy.
The university’s second annual New Space Age Conference focused on getting out in front of the space race of the new millennium, which is being fueled by private companies looking to create and expand a brand new commercial market for space travel.
Aside from making space travel affordable for the public, one of the hot topics at yesterday’s forum was the ongoing effort to land astronauts on Mars and the technology that would be required before a human could set foot on the Red Planet.
Among the challenges facing future Mars-bound astronauts will be dealing with radiation exposure, developing better propulsion systems that will allow them to complete the journey, which would currently take eight months, and creating equipment reliable enough to withstand the journey.
“If we had all these things, we can just do it,” said Jeffrey Hoffman, a former NASA astronaut and MIT professor. “There’s a lot of challenges ahead.”
Hoffman, who serves as the deputy principal investigator of an experiment aiming to produce oxygen from extraterrestrial material for NASA’s Mars 2020 mission, said finding a way to get there is one thing — but finding a way to create a self-sustainable colony will be exponentially more difficult.
“The level of skills we’ll need will be much broader,” Hoffman said. “We’ll need a lot of MacGyvers up there.”
Keegan Kirkpatrick, an aerospace engineer and founder of RedWorks, said in order for humans to truly become interplanetary, future astronauts will have to cut the cord completely.
“Mars has to operate independently from Earth,” he said. “Colonization is a question of high value and low cost. You have to have a lot of people to support a large diverse economy. Mars has to achieve resource independence. This was key to the colonization of the Americas. “
And when it comes to funding such an ambitious expedition, scientists gathered yesterday agreed it’s going to take a partnership between government and private companies.
“It would be prohibitively expensive,” Hoffman said, noting the $20 billion Apollo 11 mission that sent man to the moon in 1969 would cost $150 billion today.
“If the government is sponsoring an expedition and something goes wrong, they get holed up in the halls of Congress. If a private company gets into an accident, they answer to shareholders,” Hoffman said. “It’s going to take a public-private partnership.”
The university will host another daylong seminar today, titled “Beyond the Cradle: Envisioning a New Space Age,” which will focus on how to adapt our culture for people that may never call Earth home and how to develop the habitats, spacecraft and innovations of the future.
