The Case for Mars (13 page)

Such an extended fight was incompatible with Baker’s temperament. As the difficulty in changing an intellectual paradigm became more and more apparent, reinforcing his natural pessimism, and as the NASA bureaucracy’s obtuseness in sticking with their $450 billion mega-fantasy approach continued to result in congressional rejection of SEI funding requests, Baker grew demoralized. In Fe
bruary of 1991, he quit Martin to go back to school at the University of Colorado for his master’s degree and to start his own consulting firm.

Ever the optimist, I persisted, touring the country giving dozens of talks and papers, writing numerous magazine articles. The Bush administration pulled together a blue-ribbon “Synthesis Group,” chaired by former Apollo astronaut General Thomas Stafford, to try to find a new architecture for the Space Exploration Initiative to replace the failed 90-Day Report. I briefed them, and followed up the briefing by continuing to work on key individuals in the committee. When the Synthesis Group report
⁷
came out in May 1991, i
t was a disappointment; they had ignored Mars Direct and instead opted for doing Mars exploration with a slightly updated version of Wernher von Braun’s nuclear propulsion mega-spacecraft plan of 1969. However, while my plan did not make it into the report, many of my key
axioms
did. On-orbit assembly was now seen as a clear minus, not a plus. Time spent on Mars was now viewed as a plus, not a minus—accomplishing something useful on Mars, not just getting there and back, was finally seen as important. So, while an opposition-class (high-energy/short-staytime) mission was retained as a mental vestige for the first Mars mission, all subsequent ones would be conjunction (low-energy/long-staytime). My methane/oxygen Martian propellant production process was identified explicitly as something that needed to be developed, if only for use on downstream missions. All this represented progress. Then, in the fall of 1991 more light appeared on the horizon when Mike Griffin, representing the best elements within the Synthesis Group, was appointed Associate Administrator for Exploration within NASA, in charge of the SEI. Griffin was reported to be someone with intellect, not your closed-off bureaucrat type at all. “If only I could get to him,” I thought. Griffin was inaccessible so I started by working on his friends, some of whom were also friends of mine. Finally, in June 1992, I got a chance to brief Griffin himself, in his office. It went well. Griffin had read some of my articles, but had some questions. In person I was able to resolve them. Griffin called up Bill Ballhaus, the president of Martin Marietta Civil Space (Schallenmuller was no longer directly involved by this time) and “asked” him (a “request” from a NASA associate administrator is treated as more than a “
request” in the aerospace industry) to allocate funds for me to develop a more detailed briefing on Mars Direct to present to his exploration planning group at NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC). He would see that they would take it seriously.

All this came to pass, and more, because what I didn’t know at the time was that Griffin liked Mars Direct so much that he proceeded to brief it to incoming NASA administrator Dan Goldin, who also became a supporter. The bottom line was that when I showed up at JSC in October 1992 for a series of detailed briefings on Mars Direct, people were definitely prepared to listen.

The exploration program group at JSC listened, and they liked what they heard, but they still had concerns. They felt that my estimates of mission mass were on the light side, and they wanted a crew of six, so a more powerful booster than the Ares would be needed. Dave Weaver, the lead mission architect in the group, was also leery about making the whole mission architecture critically dependent upon Mars-based production of propellant. True, it was made before the crew that would need it left Earth, so no one would be stranded, but if the propellant production failed, the program would still be a failure. Weaver and I went into his office and got out the chalk and worked out a compromise mission architecture that answered his concerns.
⁸
I call this plan “
Mars Semi-Direct” (
Figure 3.2
). Instead of two launches per mission there would be three, one delivering a self-fueling Mars ascent vehicle to the surface together with a lot of equipment and supplies, one delivering an Earth return crew cabin together with a methane/oxygen chemical propulsion stage to a high orbit about Mars, and a final launch delivering a hab with the crew to the Martian surface. Now, instead of having to make enough propellant to send an Earth return vehicle directly from the Martian surface to Earth, all that would be needed would be enough to send the Mars ascent vehicle from the srface to rendezvous with the crew cabin in orbit, after which the orbiting chemical stage would push the crew the rest of the way home. The Mars ascent vehicle is light enough that if no extra cargo is sent with it, a fully fueled version could delivered to the Martian surface with a single heavy lift booster launch. Thus if insitu propellant manufacturing should fail, the program could st
ill be saved with the aid of a fourth booster launch. I didn’t like this architecture as much as the classic Mars Direct, because limiting the application of Martian propellant production also limits its benefits. Instead of Mars Direct’s two launches and two spacecraft per mission, three of each would be required by the Mars Semi-Direct plan, and the extra launches and vehicles would make it more expensive. Furthermore, a mission-critical Mars orbit rendezvous had been introduced on the return leg. But it was clearly an extraordinary advance over previous NASA thinking, with all payloads being delivered to Mars with direct throw of the booster, no on-orbit assembly of mega-spacecraft, and long duration surface stays and use of in-situ resources starting on the very first mission. It was a compromise, but a viable one, a plan I could support. Mike Duke and Humbolt “Hum” Mandell, two relatively senior personalities at JSC, also became early and strong advocates of the Mars Semi-Direct plan, and support within JSC solidified rapidly thereafter.

In 1993, Weaver pulled together a large cross-NASA team to undertake an elaborate design study of the Mars Semi-Direct plan. I participated in this study as an advisor. Once again, with the large team in play, centrifugal tendencies were evident. Representatives of various programs tried to skew things to ensure a leading role for their systems. In dealing with this large team, Weaver was basically in the position of someone trying to herd cats. Nevertheless, the team developed a workable, if bloated, plan based on Mars Semi-Direct. This expanded version of the Mars Semi-Direct plan was then subjected to a cost analysis by the same JSC costing group that had developed the $450 billion estimate for the 90-Day Report. The analysis incorporated the development of all required technology, including the large booster (i.e., no sharing of the cost of that system’s development with a lunar exploration program was assumed), and flying three complete human missions to Mars. The bottom line: $55 billion, or one-eighth the cost of the traditional plan. In July 1994, word of this work reached
Newsweek
magazine and made the cover. “A manned mission to Mars?”
Newsweek
asked. “The technology is already in place. And at $50 billion—one-tenth of previous estimates—it’s a bargain.”

FIGURE 3.2
Mission Sequence for the Mars Semi-Direct plan. Every two years, three boosters are launched. One to deliver a crew to Mars in the hab, the others to deliver unmanned payloads consisting of a self-fueling Mars ascent vehicle (MAV) and an Earth return vehicle (ERV). When it’s time to return home, the crew transfers to the MAV and rides it to a rendezvous with the orbiting ERV, which then carries the crew to Earth. The Year 1 hab is flown to Mars without a crew, creating a reserve hab for the first piloted flight, which arrives at Mars in the Year 3 hab
.

Among those who have studied the problem, there is now a consensus that an affordable, technologically do-able, politically supportable plan exists that can get humans to Mars—one with the Mars Direct concept as its basis. This is not a program for some distant future generation, but for us. It is a mission that can be designed by the engineers of today and flown by people who ar in the astronaut corps, today.

In the following chapters we’ll take a closer look at the Mars Direct plan, and see how it works, step by step and piece by piece. And what it holds not only for sending humans to Mars, but for exploration, human settlement—and even transformation of the Red Planet itself.

FOCUS SECTION—THE MARS UNDERGROUND

Sometimes a small group of individuals can shout loud enough to be heard above the din, and that’s certainly true in the case for Mars.

In the decade following the Apollo program, plans for the human exploration of Mars essentially dropped off NASA’s horizon as the agency struggled to get the Space Shuttle up and flying. Manned Mars exploration studies within the agency were virtually unheard of, but commencing in the early 1980s, the notion of sending humans to Mars started wafting through the space community due to the efforts of a small band of Mars enthusiasts who, in short order, became known as the Mars Underground. To understand where the underground began, we have to go back to 1978, the sleepy interstitial period between Skylab and the Space Shuttle. The last Apollo voyage, Apollo 18, flew in July 1975, and then not to the Moon but to low Earth orbit to dock with Russian counterparts. Previous to Apollo 18, no American had flown into space since Skylab 4, in November 1973. The
Voyagers
, due to inspect the gas giants at the far edge of the celestial neighborhood, had been launched the previous year.
Pioneer-Venus 1
and 2 had winged off to Venus and would reach the planet at year’s end. The shuttle would not fly until April 1981. All in all, it was a fairly sleepy time in the space community, a time when fertile minds look around for something mischievous to do, like reengineering a planet. So it was that Chris McKay, then a graduate student in astrogeophysics at the University of Colorado, started up a seminar on terraforming Mars.

The seminar arose out of hallway discussions and graduate student lounge beer and bull sessions prompted by the
Vikings’
dismal but intriguing findings. Mars appeared lifeless, according to
Viking
, but it also appeared that Mars needn’t remain that way—a bit of wisely applied planetary engineering, terraforming, could bring Mars back to the future as, once again, a warm, wet planet. Joining McKay were Carol Stoker, a fellow astrogeophysics graduate student; Penelope Boston, an undergraduate biology major and long-time friend of McKay’s; Tom Meyer, president of his own engineering firm and a friend of Stoker’s from years past; computer scientist Steve
Welch; and a gaggle of others, perhaps twenty-five in all. Charles Barth, the director of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, acted as mentor and counselor to the group, helping them transform informal conversations into a formal seminar on “The Habitability of Mars.”

Over the course of the first semester, the seminar’s participants, with some gentle nudges from Barth, recognized that terraforming Mars was a tall order, even for graduate students. They also realized that they were theory-rich and data-poor. While entertaining and intriguing perhaps, discussions of terraforming Mars without more data would really lead nowhere. They needed more information about Mars—its present atmosphere, its past atmosphere, volatiles, resources, a multitude of items—data that human missions could collect. So, the group began to focus on near-term human missions to Mars, and eventually wrote up their findings as “The Preliminary Report of the Mars Study Group.” Barth shephernowhere. Tthe report to NASA headquarters and word soon got out that a band of graduate students and others out in Boulder were enthusiastically—and intelligently—investigating human missions to Mars as well as a new science known as terraforming, more about which to come. Some of the seminar’s members scraped money together and piled into cars for cross-country drives to various space science conferences and meetings where they would occasionally bump into others of their own “flavor,” individuals who were entranced by the Boulder group’s enthusiasm, vision, and intelligence.

During the spring of 1980, McKay and Boston crossed paths with Leonard David at an American Astronautical Society meeting in Washington, D.C. David had spent the past few years arranging student forums on space exploration and had heard about the Boulder crew. The three hit it off fairly quickly and what started as a chat about Mars exploration ended with David suggesting that some effort ought to be made to hold a conference on human Mars exploration. This was something of a novel idea, as twenty-something graduate students usually didn’t organize and host planetary exploration conferences, but adopting something of a “Why not?” attitude (they really didn’t have anything to lose), a cluster of Mars devotees, began so
me low-key planning. McKay, Boston, Welch, Meyer, Stoker, and Roger Wilson, another University of Colorado student, started working on a list of possible topics to be addressed and possible speakers. Via some graduate student guerrilla methods, they ran off a hundred or so copies of a conference announcement and bundled them off for distribution. Much to everyone’s surprise, calls started coming in, both from those who wanted to attend and from researchers interested in delivering papers. Deriving the forum’s name from a seminal article entitled “The Case for Humans on Mars” that Viking scientist Ben Clark had written in 1978, in late April, 1981, the Boulder group hosted the first “Case for Mars” conference.