If humans get to Mars, what might they do? 

Tuesday, January 20, 2004
By Deborah Zabarenko, Reuters

WASHINGTON - If humans ever get to Mars, what might they 
do there? Would they use spare weapons-grade plutonium 
to heat up the red planet to a more Earth-like temperature, 
as one fanciful-sounding plan suggested? 

Probably not, according to Humboldt Mandell, a former 
chief of NASA's Mars programs. But he said a favored 
Mars exploration plan could be considerably quicker 
than the White House proposal for a Moon base to be 
used as a stepping stone for a human mission to our 
next-door planetary neighbor.

Some NASA officials wondered privately before Wednesday's 
announcement why they had been left out of discussions 
about the presidential program.

Still, Mandell, a 40-year NASA veteran who left a year 
ago to become a research fellow at the University of 
Texas Center for Space Research, said the U.S. space 
agency has the technical know-how to accomplish the 
moon and Mars missions, though not necessarily as the 
White House envisions.

For a start, Mandell said in a telephone interview 
that while a permanent Moon base was possible, it 
would double the cost of any human mission to Mars.

"I have no objection to building a Moon base, but if 
you're going to go to Mars, the cheapest way to do it 
is to base it on the Earth and then make Mars the 
second safest place in the solar system for humans, 
and then send the humans to Mars," Mandell said.

He said there would be "logistical nightmares" lurking 
in the plan to transport equipment and humans to the 
Moon and then launch a mission to Mars from there.

"With one-third of the NASA budget, in six or seven 
years you could be at Mars," Mandell said. "It doesn't 
compute with me to try to drag it out."

18 Months on Mars

A faster method - ranging in price from $20 billion 
to $100 billion as opposed to an earlier NASA estimate 
of about $400 billion - would be to build a beachhead 
on Mars before humans arrive, he said.

"The right way to do this job is to build a little 
village there before you ever send humans," Mandell 
said. "You'd put Winnebago-size payloads there and 
they would connect to each other robotically." These 
payloads would include living quarters, hospital, and 
kitchen: "All the things that you need to sustain a 
crew of six or seven people for a year and a half," 
he said.

This would include a plant to produce water from the 
ice that might be available beneath the martian surface. 
The water would be for human use during the mission, and 
could then be split into hydrogen and oxygen to fuel the 
trip back to Earth, according to Mandell.

This scenario estimates a six- or seven-month travel 
time from Earth to Mars, an 18-month stay, and another 
six or seven months for the voyage home.

The space shuttle fleet, grounded since the fatal 
Columbia accident on Feb. 1, 2003, would have only 
a small role in this plan, carrying crew members to 
the Mars craft as it moved in Earth orbit, Mandell 
said. The Mars vessel would go from Earth orbit to 
Mars.

Mandell acknowledged that research has been done on 
various Mars exploration ideas over the decades, 
including plans to tap any oases on Mars, to use any 
resources on the planet as propulsion systems, and to 
use spare weapons-grade plutonium to heat up the 
planet - where the average temperature is a minus 
81 degrees F - to a more human-friendly temperature.

This last idea is known as terraforming, and Mandell 
rejected it out of hand.

"I'm one of those people that's conscientiously 
against terraforming," he said. "It may be technically 
possible. But to think about taking the most deadly 
element that's known to humanity, like plutonium, and 
mucking up Mars with it, to me that borders on the immoral."

Source: Reuters

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