Nehaveigur

As I kid, I read The Case for Mars by Robert Zubrin. The book had come out a few years earlier, in 1996. I don’t remember the details, but the overall message has stayed with me: We could go to Mars with current technology and even settle it, if only we dedicated enough resources to it. More recently, Elon Musk has made a similar point: We just need to build a big enough rocket, and within a few years we’ll be sending a lot of cargo and hundreds of settlers to Mars. Here’s a recent post describing this vision.

Maciej Cegłowski on Idle Words paints a more pessimistic picture. He doesn’t think that current technology is close to sustaining astronauts for the minimum of 650 days that the mission would take. This is not only much longer than anyone has remained in space without resupply (128 days) and longer than the absolute record for space flight (438 days), but also under more difficult conditions. For example, the crew wouldn’t be able to rely on real-time communications with Earth due to latency, and they would be exposed to possibly lethal doses of radiation. As a result, he believes that there’s no realistic prospect of landing before 2050. This is past the median prediction on Metaculus (2042).

I also agree that a successful development program would look more like NASA’s cautious approach and less like SpaceX’s approach of iterating quickly.

I have no doubt that Cegłowski is correct that scientifically speaking, sending uncrewed probes to Mars would be the superior investment. Most of the cost and risk of a crewed mission would come from having to keep the crew alive. I also think that the real value of a Mars mission isn’t science but inspiration. Sending people on this journey and telling the rest of us what it’s like is a noble goal. If we don’t go, what does that say about us? It doesn’t even have to be Mars, or only Mars. I’d love to see some of us visiting the moons of Jupiter and Saturn and telling us about it for the same reason. Yes, it’s much cheaper and less risky to send robots, but is it so irrational to want humans to go too?