Project "Exodus". What lies behind the dream of the colonization of Mars?

From a translator: Recently, regularly published publications on the various technical aspects of the upcoming space expansion. I want to share with you an article that examines the conceptual issues facing humanity, which has already gone into space, but has not yet made it his home.

On March 27, American astronaut Scott Kelly launched from Earth and six hours later boarded the International Space Station. He has remained there ever since. Every day, the ISS makes fifteen and a half revolutions around the Earth, which means that Kelly circled the Earth 450 times in a month. At the moment, this is about a thousand.

Kelly is 51 years old, not tall (170 cm), stocky, with a round face and a barely noticeable smile. If everything goes smoothly, he will not return to Earth until March 2016, thereby setting a record for the length of time in space among Americans.

Even a short stay in space is a difficult test for the human body. Changes in intracranial pressure can cause eye problems. Weightlessness causes dizziness. Liquids accumulate where they should not be. Muscles atrophy and bones become fragile. The internal organs of the astronauts move up, and their spine extends. According to expectations, by the time Kelly descends to Earth, his growth will increase to 175 cm.

NASA defines the Kelly Odyssey as an “one-year mission.” As he describes circles around the Earth, scientists from the Agency will monitor the deterioration of his physical and emotional state, monitor sleep patterns, heart rate, immune response, fine motor skills, metabolism and intestinal bacteria. Kelly has a twin brother, Mark, who was also an astronaut. (Mark Kelly is better known as the husband of Gabriel Giffords, a former congressman from Arizona.) Throughout the year, Mark will undergo many of the same cognitive and physiological tests as Scott, but without leaving Earth. This will give an idea of ​​the impact of space travel on a person down to the molecular level.

Kelly's one-year mission is a rehearsal for a longer, uninterrupted and grueling journey. According to NASA's Buzz Lightyear -style wording , this is a stepping stone to the Mars is No Limit mission. According to the closest trajectory, Mars is 56 million kilometers from Earth and, according to the most probable scenario, the flight there will take 9 months. Due to the relative motion of the planets, any astronaut who reaches Mars will have to wait 3 months before heading back home. What NASA learns about Kelly, at least theoretically, will help predict and overcome the difficulties of interplanetary travel.

But, despite NASA’s preparations for the “Mars is not the limit” mission, its actual achievements have been reduced. The last time the Americans flew to the moon was in 1972. In fact, since the Nixon administration, not a single American has flown further than Low Earth Orbit (LEO). (The International Space Station, which is in low Earth orbit, maintains an average altitude of 354 km.) Now even this distance is greater than NASA can cover.

Following the closure of the space shuttle program in 2011, the Agency does not have sufficient funds to send astronauts to LEO. Therefore, before embarking on a mission, Kelly had to fly to Baikonur in the steppes of Kazakhstan. There he spent several nights in a hotel for astronauts, waiting for a flight with two Russians on a Soyuz ship.

Without a doubt, even a journey of 56 million kilometers should begin somewhere. However, a reasonable person may ask: Where are we going? Really to Mars? Or just to Kazakhstan?

In some books of recent years, authors raise these questions, some directly, others more foggy. Chris Impie, an astronomer from the University of Arizona, is studying the structure and evolution of the universe. In the book Beyond: Our Future in Space (Norton), he predicts a bright “extraterrestrial” future. According to him, after 20 years, the space tourism industry will flourish, coupled with sex motels in zero gravity. Thirty years later, small but viable colonies will appear on Mars and the Moon. In a hundred years, a generation of babies born in space will appear in these colonies. In 2115, he writes, those who were born outside the Earth and have never been home came of age.

Impe is aware of NASA's current problems. In the book “Beyond,” he devoted considerable attention to a graph showing how the Agency’s budget has changed over time. From the late fifties to the end of the sixties, it increased until, a year or two before the first moon landing in 1969, it reached the level of 5% of all federal spending. Then, like space debris rushing toward Earth, it contracted sharply. Today, NASA appropriations account for less than 0.5% of the federal budget.

"No bucks, no Buck Rogers"Notes Impi. He is frank about the failures of the space shuttle program, which ended in two disasters - the loss of the shuttles Challenger and Columbia, and with them the lives of fourteen astronauts. Even when the devices did not explode, the shuttles never functioned as stated: “the number of launches was ten times less than originally planned, and the cost of one launch was twenty times higher.”

But NASA is not the only player on the scene. Impe is encouraged by the surge in the number of private companies in the space business. He mentions the “bold” plans of Danish entrepreneur Bas Lansdorp, who promotes one-way travel to Mars on the Internet. Lansdorp plans to fund his project by making it a reality show - imagine a mixture of the films Survivor, The Truman Show, and Martian Chronicles. Other commercial projects include Blue Origin by Jeff Bezos, Virgin Galactic Richard Branson and Space Adventures Eric Anderson. Space Adventures have already found their niche by arranging visits to the ISS for wealthy people. (The last approved flight was the flight of the English singer Sarah Brightman worth 52 million dollars; the singer postponed the flight, however,

Стивен Петранек, автор книги «Как мы будем жить на Марсе», ожидаемой к выходу в издательстве Simon & Schuster, выдвигает еще более смелые гипотезы. По его версии, люди появятся на Марсе чуть больше чем через десять лет. Петранек — журналист, до работы в журнале Discover был главным редактором журнала This Old House, возможно такой карьерный путь объясняет почему основные темы книги посвящены тому, какие инструменты необходимо иметь на марсианских стройках. «Нельзя допустить, чтобы процесс бурения воды был остановлен на полпути только потому, что не предвидели проблему наличия залежей минералов, для бурения которых необходим другой тип бура», указывает он.

Petranek describes a multi-stage settlement program. Pioneers of Mars will have to fight for survival, almost the same as the American colonists. To get water, they will need to plow the soil of the planet, known as regolith, to melt the ice and distill the resulting water. To breathe, you will have to split the water into hydrogen and oxygen, then mix the oxygen with an inert gas, most likely the argon they will receive, well, from somewhere. Ultimately, according to Petranek, a balance shift will occur. Instead of adapting to the conditions of life on Mars, people will adapt Mars to their needs. They will change the atmosphere and heat the planet. As the regolith melts, the ancient rivers will flow again and life will be reborn on their red banks. More and more people will arrive on Mars until the whole cities appear.

Mars, he writes, will become a new frontier, a new hope and a new destiny for millions of people on Earth, willing to do much to take advantage of new opportunities awaiting on the red planet.

A different look at the future of man in space is offered by Eric Conway in the book “ Exploration and Development: The Laboratory of Jet Propulsion and the Mysteries of Mars ” (published by Johns Hopkins). Conway is a science historian at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at California Technical University, writing in dry language similar to the surface of the moon. Conway pays particular attention to precisely those technical issues that Impi and Petranek have ignored. (A significant part of the “Research and Development” is devoted to gates and navigation software.)

NASA has already completed several missions to Mars. Some of them ended unsuccessfully. Due to the lack of people on board, successes and failures do not attract much public attention. Conway wants to understand what mistakes were made and what lessons were learned from them. The result of this analysis suggests that it is unlikely that anyone will want to participate in the first manned journey.

Recall the case of the orbital vehicle that investigated the atmosphere of Mars. It was an apparatus that looked like a huge TV. It was intended to collect data on the atmosphere of Mars and as a means of communication for other probes. The device, worth $ 125 million, was launched from Cape Canaveral on December 11, 1998. He spent nine and a half months traveling through the solar system until September 23, 1999, when, in space terminology, he arrived at the moment of launching into orbit. Everything seemed to go according to plan before the device flew over Mars and the connection with it was cut off. He was supposed to reappear after 20 minutes, but never showed up. Instead, it burned out in the atmosphere of Mars. A subsequent investigation into the accident led to Lockheed Martin, a NASA contractor. The company's engineer forgot to convert the English units to the metric system. As a result of this, when evaluating the strength of a shunting jet engine, they were mistaken in calculations by 4.5 times. There were chances to notice this miscalculation, but all of them, according to Conway, were missed due to “mistakes, oversight and lack of personnel”.

The jet propulsion laboratory, where Conway works, is developing missions to Mars for NASA. This means that he had access to officials involved in the failure associated with this orbiter, as well as to those who participated in more successful projects, such as the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity or MER-1, which in January 2004 landed on Mars near the equator in a place allegedly containing water. (The life of the Opportunity apparatus is already forty times longer than expected, and the rover continues to send data to this day.) Conway sympathizes with the Agency’s problems and, like Impi, associates them, at least in part, with budget cuts. But how much Impi and Petranek rush things to explore Mars by people, so Conway hopes that this will not happen soon.

According to Conway, there is a gap between the desire to travel in space and the desire to understand it. This “gap” is a much more significant problem for NASA than budget cuts that lasted decades. This contradiction is an integral part of the NASA structure, which includes a human space exploration program on the one hand and a scientific program on the other. The planned missions to Mars were still of a scientific nature, but sometimes, at the insistence, human-oriented missions were mixed with them. As soon as this happened, the result was complete “chaos”.

Conway adheres to the scientific nature of missions and, in his opinion, human orientation in this case is the wrong way. People should not even try to get to another planet. Not so much because they are fragile, vulnerable, and transporting them is expensive, but because they themselves are "a complete disaster."

“People create biomes both around themselves and inside,” he writes. NASA insists that the landing modules of the ship must be sterile, but "we cannot sterilize ourselves." If people get to the red planet - an event that, as the forty-nine-year-old Conway claims is unlikely to happen during his lifetime - they will immediately ruin the planet, simply appearing there: "Scientists need untouched Mars, not exposed to the harmful effects of the Earth." If people begin to change the atmosphere and melt regolith, they are worse off.

“There will be no more Mars, which is of interest to scientists,” writes Conway. “It will be another Mars.”

A couple of weeks after Scott Kelly reached the ISS, SpaceX, a private aerospace company, launched a rocket with cargo intended for the station. The shipment contained electronic equipment and products for the team, as well as 20 live mice for research. In addition, a coffee machine was sent for the Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti to make espresso in microgravity. “This is a sip for a person and a huge sip for all of humanity,” the Daily Coffee News website reported.

The rocket that delivered the cargo was designed for reusable use. After the launch, the first stage of the launch vehicle was supposed to return to Earth and land softly on a ship in the Atlantic Ocean. This part of the launch did not go as planned; instead of a smooth descent, the step toppled over and exploded. The founding of SpaceX, Elon Musk tweeted to his 2 million subscribers that the failure was due to "a throttle response rate that was lower than expected."

Despite a series of failures that have been widely publicized, SpaceX has achieved more than any other company, proving that private space companies can fly. This made Mask, on whose account other business projects, including PayPal and Tesla, a favorite among enthusiasts for the exploration of Mars. (“How we will live on Mars” is essentially a continuation of the story about Musk’s achievements.) Despite the fact that SpaceX has not yet sent a single person to at least low Earth orbit (the flight of the first astronauts is planned for 2017), Musk said working hard on a plan to create a "transport ship for the colonization of Mars." He recently announced that he expects to devote in detail the development of the transport ship by the end of this year.

For Musk, flying to Mars is not just a cool event. “Are we on the way to becoming a multi-planetary view or not?” He asks. “If not, well then this is not a happy future. We will just hang out on Earth until another catastrophe destroys us. ”

Impi has a similar opinion. “Humanity has evolved millions of years,” he remarked. “But over the past 60 years, atomic weapons have created a potential threat of our own destruction. Sooner or later, we will have to leave this green-blue ball, otherwise we will die out. ” Petranek says the same. “There are real threats to the continued survival of the human race on Earth, including the inability to protect our planet from environmental destruction and the likelihood of nuclear war,” he writes. "The first settlers on Mars are the best hope for the survival of our species."

Why do the same people believe that we can live outside the Earth, but do not believe that we can live on it? The connection between these two ideas can be traced back to Enrico Fermi. In 1950, Fermi, one of the fathers of the atomic bomb, turned to Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb, and asked, "Where is everyone?" Further discussion of this issue gave rise to the so-called Fermi paradox of the following content:

Earth is an ordinary planet orbiting an ordinary star. Given the age of the universe and the speed of our technological development, intelligent life forms from another part of the galaxy should already have appeared on Earth. But neither themselves nor their traces were noticed. So where are they?

A decade later, Frank Drake, who graduated from astronomy at Harvard, pondered a similar question and managed to formulate this problem in numerical form. The key variable in the well-known Drake equation is how long civilization capable of building rockets and anti-gravity espresso machines will last. If there are many planets suitable for life and this life is a rational form, and if intelligent beings on one planet are able to communicate with intelligent beings on another planet, then the fact that no one has contacted us means that such a civilization does not exist.

“If you look at the current level of our technological development, something unusual must happen to civilization, and this is“ unusual ”in the bad sense of the word,” Musk said in a recent interview with Aeon magazine. "It is likely that there are a lot of extinct single-planet civilizations." Of course, a galaxy in which there are "a lot of extinct single-planet civilizations" can also contain a lot of two-planet ones.

In 1965, while preparing to launch man on the moon, NASA funded a study on man's best friends. The agency wondered what would happen to dogs released into outer space. In groups of three, the test animals were placed in chambers from which air was pumped out.

Dogs are adapted (more or less) to air pressure at sea level. This means that the gases dissolved in their bodies are balanced with pressure from the outside. By placing the dog in a vacuum, this life-giving balance will be upset. The cameras installed in the compartments showed that the dogs swelled like balloons or, in the words of the official results of the study, “inflated bags of goat skin”. (It is interesting to note that this phenomenon did not affect the eyeballs of dogs, although the soft tissue around them greatly swelled, as did the tongue).

The pressure drop also negatively affected the gastrointestinal tract. Inflated dogs blew air through the intestines; this led to frequent and simultaneous acts of bowel movement, urination, and intense vomiting. The animals had a numb tongue and suffered from seizures similar to epileptic. (This effect was the result of heat loss due to the rapid evaporation of moisture). A total of 126 dogs with different residence times were tested in the chamber. Of those who spent two minutes in artificial space, a third died. The rest were blown away and eventually recovered. Among those who were in a vacuum for 3 minutes, the mortality rate was two-thirds.

I came across " Experiments on decompression of animals in an airless environment»During the study of the annual mission to Mars. Perhaps this is just my geocentric bias, but I was struck by the analogy. Despite all his training and courage, Kelly, in essence, is another experimental mammal. Like dogs, he is placed in an airtight chamber to see how much his body can withstand. And in both experiments, the results, at least in general terms, are completely predictable.

Every living creature endowed with feelings that we have encountered in the universe so far - from dogs, humans and mice to turtles, spiders and seahorses - has evolved to adapt to a cosmic body called Earth. The idea that we can take these forms, the most beautiful and wonderful, and throw them into space, and this, according to Petranek, will become “our best hope”, is as fantastically contrived as it is deeply depressed.

As Impi points out, for six decades now we have the opportunity to smash ourselves to pieces. Once we really destroy ourselves, because we are already destroying a lot of species. But the problem in the perception of Mars as a spare planet (in addition to the lack of oxygen, air pressure, food and drinking water) is that we lose sight of the main thing. Wherever we go, we will take us with us. Either we are able to cope with the problems posed by our own minds, or not. Maybe the reason we have not met a single extraterrestrial being is because those who survived do not scamper around the galaxy. Maybe they sit quietly at home and look after their gardens.