The Big Think - Should We Go to Mars?

Mars, the Red Planet.

For millennia, an object of mystery,

intrigue and fantasy.

But now it's more than that.

It's the next target in the human exploration of space.

It's a thrilling prospect, but how likely are we to succeed?

And is it a journey we should even be attempting?

With a career spanning medicine, astrophysics and aeronautics,

Dr Kevin Fong is uniquely placed to explore the incredible challenges

that a human mission to Mars would pose.

This is going to be the most risky human expedition in the history of our species.

The Red Planet, Mars. For over 2,000 years, the symbol for war.

Now, with the help of the BBC's archive...

We've just had some amazing photographs sent back by the American probe

to Mars, Mariner 6.

...Kevin is going to explore what we'll need to do if we are to succeed.

It cannot happen without your ability to integrate stuff in low Earth orbit.

It cannot happen without international cooperation.

It's a journey that will test technology and human survival to their limits.

No-one knows if it's possible.

That isolation, that feeling of isolation,

partly because of the delay in communications, will be quite intense.

It's a debate that, for Kevin, pushes the limits of technology,

the extremes of human endurance and explores the very idea of what it is

to be human.

Go, Atlas. Go, Centaur.

We're in the early days of a new space race.

This time, the target is Mars.

But it isn't the Russians going toe to toe with Nasa,

it's private companies taking their first steps into space.

No-one is better qualified to explore the challenge of our first

human expedition to Mars than Dr Kevin Fong.

He's trained and worked with Nasa,

and he's researched human survivability in extreme environments to better

understand the challenges of human space missions.

The effects of altitude are pretty obvious.

With the race to Mars well and truly under way,

Kevin will dissect the unique challenges such a mission would face,

explore the reasons for going,

encounter powerful arguments against a human mission to Mars and,

in so doing, make his case for the toughest journey humanity will have ever attempted.

The first problem with Mars is that history is against us.

Our robotic spacecraft have been there many times already,

with decidedly mixed results.

We've been firing stuff at Mars for more than half a century now.

The first missions went in the 1960s.

And we've slowly been building up this collage of evidence about what

Mars is like.

The very first spacecraft to reach the Red Planet was Nasa's Mariner 4 probe.

As Mariner 4 swept past Mars,

its black and white television camera snapped 22 close-up pictures of the planet.

These images, the first-ever digital television pictures,

were stored on a tape recorder.

Then they had to be radioed back to Earth.

But the early successes of the Mariner probes paint a false picture,

because Mars is littered with the wreckage of failure.

The history of Mars exploration is pretty chequered.

It's actually worse than 50/50, our success rate there.

It's more like one in every three objects that we throw at Mars actually

gets there and completes its mission.

Nasa's Mariner 3 and Mariner 8 probes were both destroyed shortly after launch.

But the Russians suffered the worst losses,

failing with every attempt they made to reach Mars between 1960 and 1971.

Then, in the 1990s, it was the Americans' turn to hit trouble again.

Two high-profile missions went wrong,

the first in an almost comically inept way.

Now, it's a mistake many of us have made,

but then most of us aren't in charge of missions into space.

Scientists at Nasa couldn't work out why the Mars Orbiter,

worth a small £78 million, got lost in space,

until someone pointed out that they'd planned everything in feet and inches

rather than metres and centimetres.

Only three months later, another mission, and more bad news.

American space agency Nasa is on the verge of having to admit to another

embarrassing failure.

The Mars Polar lander would be the second spacecraft that it's lost in

- just two months. - Three days on, and still no sign of their lost lander.

Nasa engineers had thought it was just a case of a misdirected

communications antenna.

Now it looks likely that the spacecraft could be seriously damaged.

The 21st century has brought little improvement in our success rate.

In 2003, the British Beagle 2 lander was lost,

apparently destroyed on impact with the Martian surface.

And in 2016, the Schiaparelli lander came to an even more violent end,

its remains now smeared across the Martian landscape.

Given this patchy and, at times, embarrassing track record,

should we really be planning to send humans to Mars?

To travel to Mars,

you're talking about crossing hundreds of millions of miles of

interplanetary space,

screaming into a re-entry at thousands of kilometres an hour, and then trying

to land on the surface of a planet on your own with no real direct input

from Earth, after months and months of journeying.

That's hard enough to do with unmanned vehicles.

So it's going to be a significant challenge for human crews.

Superficially, our record of sending humans into space gives cause for optimism.

Apollo was a triumph.

But since Apollo, it can be argued that we've regressed.

Since December 1972,

when Apollo 17 blasted off from Taurus-Littrow crater,

no human has ventured more than 250 miles from the surface of the Earth.

Britain's first astronaut, Helen Sharman, disagrees.

She feels our experiences with the International Space Station and

the space shuttle have been the perfect preparation for sending humans to Mars.

We've learnt technically how to create more reliable spacecraft,

how to create better cooling systems,

how to generate energy in different ways.

So there's lots that we've learnt, and it will provide us in good stead

for the future.

Despite the failure of many robotic missions to Mars,

we have made some progress in human space flight.

But there's no getting away from the scale of the challenge.

The first big problem happens right at the start of the mission.

Sending humans to Mars will require some seriously heavy lifting.

Putting Apollo into space required the biggest and most powerful rockets

ever built. But they're puny compared to what will be needed for Mars.

When you're talking about exploring Mars, it's all about how much you want to take with you,

what you want to pack to go there, who you want to go.

It's about the mass that you want to deliver to the surface of Mars.

And so every kilo you want to take to Mars requires tens - if not hundreds -

of kilos of equipment to move it to low Earth orbit.

It's estimated that even a modest crewed mission to Mars will require

a payload of 40 tonnes.

That's 40 times what was needed to send the Curiosity rover to Mars.

And just getting that off the ground would be a mammoth task.

Climbing out of the deep gravity well,

that huge force of attraction around a planet like Earth,

is the most difficult bit.

It requires an explosive release of energy, massive energy,

energy comparable to the size of a small nuclear weapon,

to get a vehicle and her crew into low Earth orbit.

And so in human space flight, in all of space flight,

the first 250 miles are the hardest 250 miles.

Several different approaches are being planned.

We have lift-off at the Falcon 9.

Miraculous. That's first-stage acceleration.

SpaceX, brainchild of South African entrepreneur Elon Musk,

is banking on small,

lightweight reusable rockets that can shuttle payload into orbit

and then come back to pick up more,

though early test results have been mixed.

And then there's Nasa.

With the Apollo programme Saturn V rocket as their template,

they've decided to take an unashamedly American route

by going large.

Nasa's rocket is called the Space Launch System or SLS.

And when it's complete, it will be the largest and most powerful rocket ever built.

It's so much larger than what we did here before, so much taller.

The best way to assemble something this complex and this big is to

assemble it vertically.

This is as high as we can go using the elevator.

The rest is on foot.

It's hard to tell, with this big of a space,

how big the actual vehicle's going to be, the rocket.

You can actually already see some signs emerging.

You can see that blue circle forming.

That is the actual diameter of the rocket.

And even at this height, we cannot contain the entire rocket.

In Stennis, Mississippi,

Nasa test the rocket engines that will power the SLS into space.

An engine like this will be just one of six which will help propel the SLS into orbit.

So when the time comes to test the much bigger SLS rocket,

it must be at the largest stand they have.

Like so much in the mission to Mars,

they'll be standing on the shoulders of Nasa's previous missions,

borrowing and repurposing the best from Apollo and the shuttle.

- How's it going, man? - It's going good. - All right.

B Stand was built over 50 years ago to test the Saturn rockets that

carried the Apollo missions to space.

Gary Benton and his team will be reshaping and upgrading this stand

so that it can cope with the next generation of rockets.

This is the same crane that we used to lift those Saturn V core stages,

and we're going to use that very same crane

to lift up the SLS core stage and place it

in this facility, anchor it down really good,

fire off about two million pounds of thrust, and that's going to be

the biggest test we've done out here since we did the Saturn V.

There's a palpable sense of excitement here,

because, for the first time in decades,

they're thinking of using these rockets to send people beyond Earth's orbit.

For now, this is Nasa's best vision of what a rocket bound for Mars

- would look like. - T-minus ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five...

But the first complete SLS rocket is still a distant dream,

and it gets worse.

Nasa estimates they will need seven SLS launches for a single Mars

mission so the huge Mars spacecraft can be pieced together in space.

But at least this problem is just a question of brute strength.

Throw enough money at it, and solutions should be found.

But the next stage of the journey poses a very different set of challenges.

There's an uncomfortable truth about the journey to Mars.

At a minimum of 34 million miles, 120 times more distant than the moon,

it's two orders of magnitude further than any journey humans have ever made before.

With existing technology, if you're using chemical propulsion,

then a journey to Mars is between six and nine months in one direction,

so from Earth to Mars.

And then you have to sit on Mars and wait for the right planetary alignments

to be able to get back, and those come up at about 30 days or so,

and then again about a year and a half later.

So the shortest mission that you could hope for for Mars is just over

a year. The longest ones are approaching three years.