ESA charts flight to… where?

I must confess I don’t pay much attention to ESA, beyond a general feeling of good-will to that organisation which carries the flag into space on my behalf as a UK citizen and taxpayer.

This article though demonstrates why I’m not holding my breath for ESA to do anything truly exciting any time soon.  My bar for exciting is quite high, it being a human mission to Mars, or the Moon at a pinch.

There were three omissions, he told his audience:

(1) Europe was now in need of a political dimension to space policy, he argued. He contrasted the slow move to consensus required among a club of 18 equal partners (the Esa member states) with the sort of impetus a US President could give to policy. It was only the likes of a US president or a Chinese premier who could say “we go the Moon”, and then direct the effort and the money to achieve that goal.

A US President has once, ever, given a meaningful space policy impetus.  Some chap called Kennedy.  After him, despite standing on the vast edifice of the physical and intellectual infrastructure that he summoned into being, no president has set a course to anywhere.  Low Earth Orbit is not a destination.  If the Chinese choose to go to the Moon, good luck to them.  If it starts another space race I just pray it is not as part of a new Cold War.

(3) And the final big omission was crew transportation. As you know, at the moment, Europe has no independent means of getting its astronauts into space. They must hitch a ride on a US or a Russian vehicle. Europe certainly has the technical means to build its own transportation system, but so far Esa member states have baulked at the cost.

And here in a paragraph is the fundamental problem.  What was not said was “We will be sending astronauts to Moon/Mars/Somewhere by [specified date] and we need to develop the hardware to do that”.  No, the focus is on the technology – we need this equipment, even though we have no plans to put it to meaningful use.  No doubt there are paper aspirations to go places, but if they were meaningful the mindset would not be the one demonstrated here.

Mars on Earth – but is this the best way to learn?

According to the European Space Agency (ESA) press release:

The first full-duration simulation of a human mission to Mars is about to begin. After closing the hatch, the crew of six will remain in their ‘spacecraft’ for 520 days.

The gist of the project is to simulate what a crew would go through on a flight to Mars.  Not how they would operate when they get there to Mars and begin to explore, but how they would operate during the flight itself.  Because there is not yet a clearly defined plan for a Mars mission, the simulation can only be quite general in nature.  So is there not enough data to be getting on with from International Space Station (ISS) missions, for example?  Sure, ISS missions tend to be about six months, rather less than the 500 days being simulated here.  But there is no particular reason you would want to take 500 days to get to Mars.  Mars Direct, one of the most worthwhile and conceptually robust Mars mission architectures you will find, takes only 6 months to get there.  But if you really wanted to know how humans would cope in claustrophobic technological adversity for longer periods, how about looking at submarine crews – there must be decades of data here.

Of more value would be simulating what to do when you get to Mars – how do you explore, what priorities do you have, how do you conduct fieldwork?  This is what the Mars Society does in its Mars Analogue Research Stations (which will get a post of their own at some point) – simulates working in and exploring a Mars-like environment.  I was delighted to read that Diego Urbina, one of the Mars500 crew members, was actually a Mars Analogue Research Station crew member earlier this year.  I am lucky enough to have done the same thing a few years ago (Crew 27 rules!).

My other reservation is that this is not part of an ambitious, clearly defined route to Mars.  Sure, ESA have aspirations, but it’s no more than that and you can keep doing this kind of groundwork indefinitely without getting anywhere if you don’t have a sharp deadline.

On the plus side though, I found this statement reassuring:

Whereas research onboard the ISS is essential for answering questions concerning the possible impact of weightlessness, radiation, and other space-specific factors, other aspects such as the affect of long-term isolation and confinement can be more appropriately addressed by the use of ground-based simulations.

If we want to go to Mars, we go to Mars.  We don’t need to get expensively waylaid on the Moon “studying” all sorts of things that we could clear up whilst still on Earth.  I’m not convinced of the utility of the ISS, but at least here we have a working assumption that we can practice many things on Earth, and then head straight to Mars.

Finally, this made me snigger:

Microbial samples will be taken from all possible reservoirs of microbes.

How (not) to get to Mars

This is the beginning of an article I started writing a few months ago, mostly as a kind of “brain dump” exercise, which I thought I would post here.  It’s a theme that I will be revisiting.

I am not a rocket scientist so I could not comment definitively, but after several years enthusiastically following the debate on how or whether to send humans to Mars, it seems that we have the technical know how to do so if we choose.  Where the whole endeavour fails of course, is money.
The obvious source of money is government.  In a limited sense this worked extremely well to get people to the Moon in the 1960s and 1970s.  The goal was set in 1962 with an extremely limited amount of technical experience and acheived a mere 7 years later.  That is a phenomenal achievement, but the motivation was ultimately shallow and the effort could not be sustained for long after the race was “won”.  The last human presence on the Moon was in 1973 – 37 years ago.  We now do not have the wherewithal to repeat this feat.  As an aside, I wonder if that is the cause for the persistence of conspiracy theories that suggest the landings were a hoax.  Pick a technology, and insert it into this sentence: “37 years ago we had [insert technology here] that could do vastly more than they can do today”.  Any example is ridiculous, and virtually unbelievable.  “37 years ago we had phones/computers/cars vastly better than we have today”.  It doesn’t make sense, and there is a certain logic to squaring this circle by concluding that the landings never actually happened.
The problem this success causes us now is that it makes the solution seem so simple: persuade President, get cheque signed, job done.  Hooray!  Simpler, because the US is far richer now than it was in the 1960s (despite various recent economic incidents), and a much wider and deeper technological base is available.  But the space race was a product of the cold war, a very different geopolitical time.  Unless a new space race begins with China as the opponent, a single-government program is not going to get funded.  I have read many articles by frustrated space activists pointing out how much we spend on various fripperies or down-right wastes of money (pet food, ID cards, etc), and comparing this figure to how much we would need to spend to send people to Mars.  “Surely, if we spend this much money on that, we would be willing to spend it on sending people to Mars!”.  I agree, but it just washes over most people.  If that argument worked, it would have done so by now.  Nearly four decades of a theory failing should be enough to persuade us that it will never work, barring a huge change in global circumstances, none of which we should wish for.
What next?  International cooperation, that other stand-by of desperate space activists looking for a way to make the costs sound more palatable.  It is estimated that the ISS will cost 35 – 100 billion dollars (admittedly over a 30 year period).  So, we will end up spending at least twice as much on this as on a Mars Semi-Direct mission.  Of course, the ISS is not a shining example of the efficacy of international cooperation.  As with the single-government funding model discussed above, the fact that the option is not on the table now means that it isn’t going to happen.

As you can see, it sets the scene, but that is about it.  What I am starting to get interested in is how can non-government money fund space exploration?  Sub-orbital flight is on the cusp of being financially viable, but there is a big jump from there to orbit, and a bigger jump from orbit to beyond.  As well as developing this theme, I will also flesh out what I have written here soon.