In his speech to Congress last month, President Donald Trump promised to “lead humanity into space and plant the American flag on the planet Mars and even far beyond”. His claim is not serious, as Trump is far too busy wrecking the global liberal order to achieve such a splendid feat. And even if he weren’t, there’s no way we can reach Mars in the next four years. Nevertheless, it is possible that the new administration, under the eye of SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, will make human travel to Mars the main goal of NASA.
The Emperor and Darth Vader may be wrong about a lot of things, but they are not wrong about this. NASA needs a purpose, one that’s worthy of the costs and risks of human spaceflight. That goal can only be sending humans to Mars. This is so because Mars is where the science is, Mars is where the challenge is, and Mars is where the future is.
Let’s start with the science. In the beginning, the Earth and Mars were twins. Both were warm, wet, rocky planets with atmospheres dominated by carbon-dioxide — then, Earth evolved life. If the theory is correct, and life emerges naturally from chemistry whenever the conditions are right, then life should have evolved on Mars too, and on millions of other planets throughout our galaxy. If we find evidence of past or present life on Mars, it means we are not alone.
There are other reasons to explore Mars. Biotechnology is going to be one of the main engineering sciences of the 21st century and many to follow. If we find life on Mars, we will be able to discover whether the DNA-RNA information system utilised by all life on Earth is universal, or whether it is just one of many possibilities. A different system could offer revolutionary engineering possibilities, as great in comparison to DNA-RNA as silicon computers are to those based on vacuum tubes, electric relays or mechanical Babbage machines.
A humans-to-Mars programme would also inspire millions of young Americans to develop their scientific talents, generating vast amounts of intellectual capital. In the Sixties, the Apollo programme doubled the number of American science and engineering graduates, whose innovations (such as the computer revolution) have since repaid the nation the cost of the programme many times over. Like individuals, nations grow when they challenge themselves and stagnate when they do not.
The business-as-usual space establishment claims that its Artemis program, which aims for a return to the Moon, is comparable to a mission to Mars. But this is simply untrue. There are no questions of fundamental scientific interest that can be resolved by exploring the surface of the Moon. Nor will we astonish the world by repeating something we did more than half a century ago.
And then there’s the matter of humanity’s future. Of all the worlds currently within our reach, Mars is by far the most viable candidate for human settlement. The Red Planet offers new branches of human civilisation the chance to have a fresh start, in a place where the rules haven’t yet been written. Unlike the ultra-dry Moon, Mars has oceanic quantities of water, including vast amounts in liquid form deep underground, as well as massive ice glaciers containing as much water as the American Great Lakes. And while the Moon lacks any meaningful supply of carbon or nitrogen — elements essential for life — Mars has an atmosphere that is 95% carbon dioxide and 2.6% nitrogen. With plentiful CO2 and water, one can grow plants for food and fibre, and make plastics and fuels. Martian water is five times as rich as terrestrial water in deuterium, which is the fuel for fusion reactors. So once fusion power is mastered, Mars will offer infinite energy, allowing its settlers to transform its mineral wealth into steel, pipes, greenhouses, and cities. It will eventually become the natural takeoff point for expeditions to mine the precious metal riches of the asteroid belt.
For the coming age of space settlement, Mars compares to the Moon as North America compared to Greenland during the age of European maritime exploration. Greenland was closer to Europe, so the Europeans reached it first. But its environment was too impoverished to host more than a few outposts. America, by contrast, would become the home of a vibrant new branch of Western civilisation.
The Artemis programme’s lack of purpose is further demonstrated by its hardware set, composed as it is of tens of billions of dollars’ worth of random elements, including the SLS heavy-lift booster, the SpaceX Starship, the Orion capsule, the National Team expendable lunar lander, and a lunar orbiting space station called the Gateway, which together would not enable a coherent mission plan. In fact, most of these hardware elements only exist because there is a constituency that benefits from their funding. The Artemis programme is vendor-driven, not purpose driven. A purpose-driven programme spends money to achieve goals. A vendor-driven programme, like Artemis, does things in order to spend money. We can and must do better.
If America is to once again have a space programme worthy of a nation of pioneers, we must act with purpose, with wisdom, and with courage. After all, we are far better prepared today to send humans to Mars than we were in 1961 to meet President Kennedy’s call to send men to the Moon — and we were there eight years later. To shrink from this challenge would be to declare that we are no longer the people we used to be — and that is a concession America cannot afford to make.
“Mars is where the science is, Mars is where the challenge is, and Mars is where the future is.”
Yet a Mars mission could easily be derailed. Trump and Musk have both defined themselves in hyper-partisan terms. But if the Mars programme is seen as a Trump-Musk hobby-horse, it will be cancelled as soon as the fortunes of political war shift, as they are certain to do long before the mission is realised. Therefore the proposals advanced by some in the Trump camp to give the programme to SpaceX to pursue outside of NASA are not merely unethical (as they would involve the sole-source distribution of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to Musk), but suicidally impractical. If the programme is to succeed, it must be in the name of America, not Elon Musk.
Furthermore, it needs to be done correctly. SpaceX’s Starship, which claims to be the world’s most powerful reusable launch vehicle, promises to be a terrific asset. But Musk insists that it should be the only vehicle used for the mission. While a Starship upper stage could be refuelled on orbit by tanker Starships, enabling it in theory to fly from Earth orbit to Mars, its 100-tonne mass makes it suboptimal for use as an ascent vehicle. It would make far more sense to develop and use a similar but much smaller vehicle — a “Starboat” if you will — to travel between the surface of Mars and its orbit. Starship plus Starboat could enable highly efficient missions to Mars. But this will require a programme leadership capable of speaking truth to power.
Technicalities aside, Musk’s vision of a Martian settlement is also seriously misconceived. He has propounded the idea that thousands of Starships should be used to rapidly land a million people on Mars to create a metropolis which will preserve “the precious light of consciousness” after the human race on Earth is destroyed in the near future (by asteroid impacts, nuclear war, runaway AI, or the woke mind virus — the plot line varies). The idea is apparently based on Isaac Asimov’s science fiction trilogy, Foundation, in which a group of scientists is sent to the far-flung planet Terminus (also Musk’s name for his colony), so that after the anticipated collapse of the galactic empire their descendants can emerge to reconstruct civilisation. It’s a grand read. But it is not applicable to the task at hand.
For one thing, you can’t just dump one million people on Mars. Starships will only be able to carry about 100 tonnes of cargo from Earth to Mars, and it will take six to eight months to perform the transit. This means that a Mars settlement of any size cannot be supported from Earth. Before large numbers of people go to the Red Planet, then, we’ll need to develop the agricultural and industrial base needed to feed, clothe, and house them. The settlement of Mars must therefore occur organically, as the settlement of America did, with small groups of pioneers creating the first farms and industries that provide the basis for supporting ever larger waves of settlers to follow.
Furthermore, as Musk should know, no million-person Mars outpost could possibly survive the collapse of human civilisation on Earth. Technological civilisation requires a vast division of labour. It is unlikely that a society of one million people could produce a good electric wristwatch, or even a wristwatch battery, let alone an iPhone. The high-tech components of Mars’s most advanced systems will need to be imported from Earth for a very long time.
And besides, the idea that a few will survive on Mars, while billions die on Earth is so morally repulsive that any programme foolish enough to adopt it would be doomed. Coated with ideological skunk essence, the mission’s protagonists would appear more like the selfish characters in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death, dancing in a castle while everyone outside dies in an epidemic, than the heroes of Foundation.
We should not go to Mars to desert humanity, but to strengthen humanity. The aim should be to vastly expand humanity’s power to meet all future challenges by making grand scientific discoveries — and yes, in the fullness of time, establishing new highly-inventive branches of civilisation. We should not go to Mars to preserve “the precious light of consciousness” in an off-world hideaway, as Musk would have it, but to liberate human minds by opening an unlimited frontier. We should not go to Mars to party while the Earth burns, but to prevent Earth from burning altogether by showing that there is no need to fight over provinces when by invoking our higher natures we can inhabit new planets. For by doing so, human freedom can expand into the cosmos.
That is the case for Mars.
