Mission to Mars in Four Basic Questions
Putting people on Mars is a goal having nothing to do with ramped up enthusiasm, counteracted cynicism or a lengthy list of potential benefits.
A Mars mission for inspirational reasons will go no further than the inspirational value of the Apollo landings. Even if enthusiastic public interest could be stirred, it wouldn’t last very long. People don’t bother to watch the International Space Station passing overhead. Why would they bother to find Mars in the night sky and ponder the notion of people wandering around up there?
Here are the questions we need to answer (by ‘we’ I imply the will of the American people as expressed in congress)…
- Do we want to continue human flight with American astronauts? Yes or No?
- If yes, do we want to go anywhere in space beyond low earth orbit (a.k.a., the International Space Station)?
- If yes, (whether the Moon, asteroids or Mars), are we prepared to fund development at a level that results in human-crewed deep space mission capability within the foreseeable future?
- If yes, can a majority in congress continue to support deep space exploration for as long as it takes to reach Mars without harming their reelection possibilities?
A ‘yes’ to all four questions results in a national goal with a good chance of success without further policy or other high-level decision-making.
That’s it!
With these fours questions the decision to send people to Mars is already nailed down. We’ll need no famous ‘Kennedy speeches’ or visionaries waxing poetic about people living on other planets.
We’ll just do it because we can do it and want to do it.
From there we can argue over the best way to fly, where to land, how long to stay and what to do while we’re there.
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[Notice how none of these questions preclude international cooperation or demand that Americans go it alone -- though politically it's far more likely to receive enduring support if American politicians can take the lion's share of credit and spread the inevitable truckloads of pork.]
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Should we go to Mars?
This question is irrelevant.
Do we want human exploration of deep space?
This question is much more important.
If we’ve said ‘yes’ to the four questions above, then there aren’t many choices beside Mars for a unifying goal. We can trudge back to the Moon to regain deep space flight experience. We can visit near-earth asteroids and push this capability a bit farther. Yet if we want to fly beyond LEO other than with Apollo-8-like demonstration missions, Mars is the only goal big enough and far enough in the future to align work on suitable launch vehicles, spacecraft and mission operations.
We may not achieve this anytime soon, yet the capability built along the way will allow all sorts of deep space exploration beforehand and after. Space infrastructure is the unspoken value here — not a singular landing on Mars itself.
How do we establish this capability?
First, my advice to the true believers — Stop pining for Mars. Ignore the ‘Case for Mars.’ Forget crazy notions of ‘manifest space destiny’ and ego-centric nationalistic malarkey. Stop claiming how this might help our economy, science, or improve our security.
Also — no more whining about funding shortfalls. Goals are achieved through steady day-by-day work aligned on a target using the funding at hand. Less funding takes longer, but has no bearing on the choice of the goal — only the pace of progress. Committing a few billion a year for 20 years may be enough.
We achieve goals through collective effort heading in the same direction every step along the way — not via camp meeting hysteria or recitation and reexamination of our reasoning.
Other than the goal itself, we don’t need anything for guidance, motivation or explanation.
Lastly…
No more acting as though we haven’t decided yet. No more wacko space conferences aimed at tipping the balance. Stop writing stacks of white papers or mounting pretend-missions in pretend-spacecraft. Especially forget about congressional hearings and special commissions.
No initiative of any value has ever progressed this way.
Why?
It is our essential human nature to decide and only later pile-drive a litany of underpinnings — pretending that we’ve somehow deduced our choice from a list of reasons rather than the other way around. Reasons and justifications are never the real motivation. They are created later to provide window-dressing around a decision we’ve already made.
People make decisions before they are consciously aware of them, and with respect to Mars, whether we realize this or not, decades ago we decided on human exploration. Now we simply need to get on with the job — or else (if I am wrong in this observation) definitively put an end to the hallucination and decide on something else besides human flight beyond low earth orbit.
For American crewed spaceflight these are the only two pathways ahead.
By our actions, not our words, we will see which choice we’ve made.
