A lunar base might be feasible; a Mars city is another matter. However, the pressing task is terrestrial: keep Earth habitable
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And so Elon Musk, the world’s visionary-in-chief, has finally rescheduled his planetary colonisation plans. Abandoning his 2014 prediction of reaching Mars by 2026, Musk now suggests his SpaceX company will establish a human base on the Moon within the next decade. ‘SpaceX will also strive to build a Mars city and begin doing so in about five to seven years,’ posted Musk on his X social network, ‘But the overriding priority,’ he concluded, ‘is securing the future of civilisation, and the Moon is faster.’
Surely it is. It’s so much faster that the two feats are hardly comparable. Travel time to the Moon is roughly three days; travel time to Mars is eight to nine months. A radio message from the Moon arrives in 1.3 seconds; from Mars, up to 20 minutes later. If a mission to our natural satellite can be launched almost any time, a mission to our closest viable planet (Venus is a no-no) must happen during a short window occurring every 26 months. All in all, any crewed mission to the Red Planet would last around three and a half years.
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Having humans live on Mars is not impossible, but it’s very, very close to being so. This isn’t about doubting the marvels of science and technology, nor the AI-driven breakthroughs on the horizon. It’s simply a matter of the unyielding laws of physics – and the fragility of our own biology.
On the one hand, there’s the so-called ‘tyranny of the Rocket Equation, formulated in 1903 by Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. To gain speed, a rocket must carry fuel – but that fuel adds mass, which in turn requires even more fuel to move. This relationship isn’t linear; it’s exponential. For a round-trip Mars mission, you need propellant to escape Earth, land on Mars, lift off again, and finally decelerate for a return to Earth. For every tonne of payload landed on the Martian surface, roughly 20 tonnes of initial mass must be launched from Earth. The resulting rocket, tasked with carrying humans and their life-support equipment, would be staggeringly massive.
A visit to SpaceX’s website suggests it has figured out how to solve most of these problems. The company envisions cargo flights for research and exploration, followed by human missions to survey resources, set up power generation and build habitats. The rocket equation’s tyranny would be dodged with orbital refuelling – a specialised spaceship in orbit providing the fuel to reach Mars.
However, to leave Mars, methane would have to be produced there, combining the abundant carbon dioxide in the atmosphere with hydrogen from predicted, but yet-to-be-found, Martian ice deposits. Of course, since Mars’s atmosphere is about 99 per cent thinner than Earth’s and you can’t use parachutes, a new technology for reliable landings would also need to be perfected. Could all of this seriously happen in, say, 20 years?
On the other hand, there’s biology. The human body evolved under Earth’s constant gravitational pull, and the effects of microgravity on it are far from negligible. Astronauts face rapid bone loss, muscle atrophy, vision changes and immune-system suppression. While those aboard the International Space Station are mostly shielded by Earth’s magnetosphere and atmosphere, deep-space travellers will miss such a vital defence against cosmic radiation. We don’t know how a human body will fare after three years of bombardment by high-energy particles. Physically, not too well. Neither psychologically – every experiment with people forced into a restricted space for long periods has produced the same discouraging results.
I suspect Elon Musk’s strategy involves deploying a fleet of Optimus humanoid robots (to be sold by Tesla someday) to pave the way and build basic Martian infrastructure. What could be more sci-fi-ish?
It may be clear by now that switching colonisation plans from Mars to the Moon was a shrewd decision indeed. After all, at a fraction of the cost, Musk can still build a colony that could secure his own ‘overriding priority’ – the future of civilisation, in case things went irredeemably wrong down here.
And things aren’t going that well. The president of the USA – an on-off friend of Musk’s – after barring clean energy and promoting fossil fuels, has now moved to roll back the federal government’s authority to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions. It’s self-inflicted nonsense, aimed at removing any mention of the climate crisis from the federal government. It’s strategically unwise, as it gives China a free hand in its clean-tech dominance. And it’s morally indefensible: perhaps you can dare to deprive your own citizens of the right to a healthy atmosphere – but what about the other billions of people on this planet? What about the next generations, those who are really meant to be the ‘future of civilisation’?
Leave Mars alone. The true, overriding priority should be saving the one and only atmosphere we possess.
