I've long been a skeptic of the idea of sending humans to Mars before we can determine whether or not there is a functioning biosphere on the planet. This recent post articulates my thoughts better than I ever could. Some choice quotes:
At NASA, the faith takes the form of a cargo cult. The agency has persuaded itself that re-enacting the Moon landings with enough fidelity will reward them with a trip to Mars, bringing back the limitless budgets, uncomplicated patriotism, and rapt public attention of the early sixties. They send up their rockets with the same touching faith that keeps Amtrak hauling empty dining cars across the prairie, dreaming of the golden age of rail.
I would compare keeping primates alive in spacecraft to trying to build a jet engine out of raisins. Both are colossal engineering problems, possibly the hardest ever attempted, but it does not follow that they are problems worth solving. In both cases, the difficulty flows from a very specific design constraint, and it’s worth revisiting that constraint one or ten times before starting to perform miracles of engineering.
Even the astronaut corps recognizes that exploring Mars and keeping it pristine are irreconcilable activities, like trying to drill for oil in a cleanroom. The problem goes beyond practical questions like how to store 17 months of astronaut shit and gets to the crux of the matter: why is bringing a leaky, bacteria-filled terrarium to Mars step one in our search for Martian life? What incredible ability do astronauts have that justifies taking this risk?
And it is hard to overlook that the $93 billion NASA has already spent through 2025 to not land anyone on the Moon would be enough to send probes to every world in the solar system, including moons we know have oceans of liquid water and two entire planetary systems that haven’t been visited since Voyager 2 gave them a quick once-over in the 1980’s.
The difficult and unglamorous problems of a Mars mission—how do you wash your socks? What is there to eat?— get no love from Elon. Once you get beyond “rocket factory go brrrrr,” there is no plan, just a familiar fog of Musky woo. The Mars rockets will refuel from autonomous robot factories powered by sunlight. Their crews will be shielded from radiation by some form of electromagnetic handwaving. Life support, the hardest practical problem in space travel, “is actually quite easy”. And of course Musk dismisses the problem of microbial contamination (which I can’t emphasize enough is governed by international treaty) as both inevitable and no big deal.
The arguments against any country or company sending a mission to Mars are overwhelming. But the subject has become an entirely emotional discussion, like the efficacy of Ivermectin in treating COVID, though with less immediate harm. Budgetary realities will probably push the problem out well into the 2040s at least, by which time a bit more reality will hopefully intrude and the whole project will be scrapped in favor of more robotics.
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