Mars is calling us. The world closest to Earth is shining with a reddish glow of the Sunlight reflected in the night sky, appealing to our curiosity and adventure spirit. It has an atmosphere and at noon on a summer day the temperature can reach 25 degrees Celsius. One day takes about 24 hours, as on Earth. But the similarity ends here. That atmosphere is 95 percent of pathogenic dioxide, at less than one percent of Earth's atmospheric pressure, so there is little insulation and winter nights can be up to 140 degrees Celsius. Mars is a tenth of Earth's mass, so gravity has only one-third of the attraction we experience. And one year lasts 687 days.
After the Apollo missions in the moon in the 1970s, sending astronauts to Mars seemed the next logical step, but it would be a "giant leap" - politically and financially. The space is great: while the Apollo missile astronauts needed only four days to reach the Moon, today's technology would take about nine months to reach Mars. And, by the time the planets were ranked favorably for the return, a full mission could take two or three years. Through this time, astronauts would need food, water and oxygen plus radiation protection.
At this point, the success rate for robotic missions does not inspire confidence. To date, Russia has launched 21 missiles on Mars, including unmanned "navigators", but only two arriving at orbit completed their missions. The US has been the most successful, missing only five out of 23 missions. But, there is still no return mission.
It is clear that more work is needed before we can think about sending people to Mars. But sooner or later we will go. With political will this can happen within 20 years. And one thing that can be done in the meantime is the testing of human psychological elasticity for such a mission.
The current record holder for the longest stance in space is Russian astronaut Valeri Polyakov who returned to Earth from the Mir station in March 1995 after 437 days in space. It tests the ability of the human body to withstand the loss of muscle and bone due to zero gravity and is a psychological test of will and patience. And while contact with astronauts at the International Space Station (ISS) is simple, as it only takes a fraction of a second to transmit Earth messages, radio signals require 20 minutes to arrive on Mars so the astronauts will feel Much more isolated, which adds to the psychological stress of being limited to just a small team.
These testing conditions have been simulated on Earth in order to evaluate their effect on humans. Mars 500 was a Russian-European-Chinese project between 2007 and 2011, in an isolated facility in a car park in Moscow. He culminated in a five-day stay of six male volunteers. They claimed to be well-behaved throughout the test, but some avoided exercise and hiding from their colleagues while four were having trouble sleeping.
The latest simulation - Hauaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation, conducted for NASA by the University of Hawaii - took place in the landscape similar to Mars at Hauai, 2,500 upstairs, on the side of Mauna Loa volcano. A six-person team emerged for one year in isolation there on August 28, 2016. They were allowed to go on simulated walks like on Mars, but only dressed in a full space suit. The rest of the time, they lived in tight conditions in a 100-square-meter geodesic dome. The European Space Agency also makes regular crew assessments at the distant Concordia station in Antarctica to assess the effects of isolation in the long, dark, polar winter. And there are other simulations made by the Mars Association in the Utah Desert and the Canadian Arctic.
President of the Mars Association, Robert Zubrin, has a mission plan he believes will be safer and cheaper than any other mission. It involves initially launching a "Return On Earth" tool (ERV) that would land on Mars and use solar or nuclear power as well as imported hydrogen to produce methane and oxygen from Martian CO2. In other words, rocket fuel. This means that people would decide to leave if they knew they would have a vehicle to return, filled with fuel, on the surface of Mars. The vehicle with which they would depart, he says, would stay on Mars to secure the next trip. A second ERV would go out at the same time to provide support and, if all goes well, it would be ready to bring the next team home two years later. In this way, a series of return journeys would build a number of livelihoods on Mars for longer stays in the future. And because most of the fuel for the return journey would be created on Mars, Zubrin believes that big energy can be produced and big cost savings.
NASA's plans are more prudent. They include the move of long-standing humanitarian missions by the ISS to come to orbit around the moon over the next 13 years, continuing scientific exploration of Mars, followed by cargo delivery and an unmanned return mission in the late 2020s. But, they say, it will not be before the early 2030s, that people come to orbit around Mars, not to go down to the planet. Meanwhile, Elon Musk, former PayPal entrepreneur and founder of SpaceX, has his plans. He already has a contract with NASA for supplying the ISS and hopes to be able to deliver goods to Mars in 2018 in preparation for a human mission in the 2020s.
"Mars is something we can achieve in our lives," he says.
The SpaceX concept has developed into some details. The current Falcon 9 and Dragon Capsule rockets are already flying after sending vehicles to the space station and the two parts return to Earth for reuse. But the Inter-American Transport System (ITS) is much more ambitious. While Falcon 9 uses nine Merlin missile engines, ITS will use 42 Raptor engines - the same size, but almost three times more. Multiple engines will do even if some of them fail, the mission can continue. The first test of a Raptor engine went well in September 2016.
The launch rocket would be the most powerful ever built - longer than Saturn V of the Apollo missions and much more capable. It can launch 300 tons of load into orbit and return to Earth vertically in the startup block, ready for reuse with minimal maintenance. As with the Mars Association plan, it is economical as it sends the outside to orbit and produces fuel itself for the return journey from Mars. But Musk wants to go beyond cargo delivery; He has the visions of a colony of Mars and a fleet of hundreds of such rocketcrafts in the next century. He says he wants to "create an independent civilization, not an advance, so that people can become a multi-planetary species."
Mars and Earth Orbits lined up for an effective mission every 26 months and Musk hopes to use what they are now, starting with unmanned tests in 2018 and sending the first people to Mars in 2026. Funding may come from Governments, enterprises and even through self-financing.
Then, far away, in the future, once the first bases exist, and then the colonies, Mars will become the challenge of forming the terrain: to become the Earth. This may include increasing the atmospheric pressure by dissolving polar dioxide with nuclear energy or solar reflectors and by adding comets of imported asteroids. This would increase the temperature and allow the return of liquefied water. But it would need the protection of an artificial magnetic field. Algae or cyanobacteria can start producing oxygen to make the breathing atmosphere.
Sounds like a fantasy material, it's true, but we've seen it often become a reality.