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A NASA advisor is taking billionaire Elon Musk’s Mars plans to task, writing Thursday that the highly ambitious endeavor won’t happen “anytime soon.”
Musk, the founder of SpaceX, has repeatedly stated that getting humans to Mars is his end goal. Speaking on Fox News this week, he predicted that a multi-planetary civilization could come as soon as the next 20 to 30 years. Previously, he had predicted that an uncrewed landing on the red planet could happen as soon as 2026, with humans there before 2030.
But, cosmologist Dr. Paul Sutter said in an op-ed published in Scientific American that Musk’s targeted dates do not correspond to a comprehensive plan, and “simply the next open launch window, when Earth and Mars are in conjunction on the same side of the solar system, and transfers to that planet require the least amount of energy.”
“It’s like announcing a camping trip on your next available weekend, without having purchased any camping supplies. And your car is in the shop. And has exploded,” he said.
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The associate research scientist at Johns Hopkins University said that while a mission to Mars is not impossible and SpaceX has made “enormous strides” in developing reusable rocket boosters, there’s still a “long road” between now and getting there in the future.
Part of it has to do with the design of the Starship spacecraft, Sutter noted. Starship’s last couple of test flights ended in fiery explosions. There is also the cost, likely in the billions if not trillions of dollars.
“In the 1960s the Apollo program went from blueprints to lunar landing in less than a decade. But Mars is another beast,” Sutter noted. “At its closest approach, that planet is 56 million kilometers away — roughly 150 times the distance to the moon. Starship cannot launch directly from the Earth and reach Mars in one go. It must refuel in orbit, a technology only in its earliest development.”
No lander has ever achieved what Starship would need to do: land on the cratered surface of Mars in a controlled and powered descent. Notably, a crewed mission would require another launch and controlled landing. That comes with its own hurdles.
“For starters, we have no working human-rated deep-space vehicle — at all. Starship will have to undergo rigorous installation and testing of life-support systems, and demonstrate a much higher degree of safety, to be certified to carry a human crew to Mars,” said Sutter.
During the two years that a typical Mars round trip takes, Starship would have to protect its crew against cosmic radiation and the “ravages of microgravity.”
These were all things the U.S. was working on before a previous pivot toward the moon. Obama-era NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said in the early 2000s that there’d be American boots on Martian soil by 2030. During his first term, President Donald Trump reversed that again in favor of the Artemis missions.
“We are very, very far away from these ideas becoming prototypes, let alone robust mission components,” said Sutter.
The Independent’s request for comment from SpaceX was not immediately returned.
Whether or not Mars is actually a pipe dream woven with the threads of fantasy remains up for debate. Some agree with Sutter’s stance.
“We’re a good 15 years away from going to Mars, not five years as Elon Musk alludes to,” former NASA astronaut José Hernández recently told The Hill.
“As I’ve always said . . . space travel is not trivial, and so what we need to do next is, we’re going to retire the International Space Station, invest that — that operational money in developing a lunar base where technologies that are needed to go to Mars need to be developed and tested and proved, because right now, there’s too many technical hurdles,” he said.
“This whole idea of terraforming Mars, as respectful as I can be, are you guys high?” Bill Nye said in an interview with USA TODAY in 2019. “We can’t even take care of this planet where we live, and we’re perfectly suited for it, let alone another planet.”
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Yet, others have taken a more measured but hopeful approach.
“Mars is possible, and in a time horizon of interest,” Hoppy Price, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said a decade ago. “It could happen in our lifetime, and it wouldn’t take a trillion dollars to do it.”
“2028 is fully possible. Now you’re talking about a one-way trip to Mars [but] you don’t want to send people on a one-way trip until there’s greenhouses and settlements and everything, a place to live,” Robert Zubrin, president of The Mars Society, told The Guardian last September.
“This is one of the problems I have with Musk’s claim. It is not my sense that they are actually developing the required surface systems for human operations on Mars,” he added. “They’re working very hard on the transportation system, but on the system to make, say, methane, oxygen on Mars on a large scale, they aren’t doing it.
If Mars becomes a human colony is anyone’s guess. Musk said 2016 that it would take 40 to 100 years to have a self-sustaining civilization on the planet. While Mars is quite barren, dusty, and chilly, SpaceX says it could warm it up somehow.
“Definitely, we’ll visit as a vacation spot. [But] I’m skeptical that you’ll find legions of people that will go there and want to stay,” astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson previously told Futurism.
