Jack’s Plan To Put Humans On The Surface Of Mars By 2033

My most admired Andrew L. Chaiklan “threw down the gauntlet to me” last night during the Planetary Radio podcast. He described sending humans to Mars as “The Mount Everest of space exploration.” He pointed out that a broken toilet on the spacecraft could be a fatal event for the astronauts on board. (He had a good point there.) He did not see humans on Mars before the 2050s.

          I do not have an engineering or scientific degree. I am not an ex-astronaut. I don’t have a NASA pedigree. Explore Mars, Inc., The Mars Society, or the National Space Society would never invite me to be a guest speaker or panel member. I have been studying the idea of a manned mission to Mars since I saw the film Flight to Mars at the King Center Drive-In theater in 1954.

       In simple language, here is how we get it done by 2033 as follows:

1) Leaving astronauts in “a tin can” for 6 months as they fly to Mars is totally unrealistic. We need to cut the travel time down to 30-45 days. This can be done with nuclear-type engines. This is not some new technology that we need to invent. We had a nuclear engine that could power a spacecraft ready to go in 1969. For some unknown reason, President Nixon canceled the program.

2) There is an old saying in engineering KISS (Keep it simple stupid.) Things that are a matter of life and death for astronauts like toilets, water filtration and recycling systems, food preparation systems, life support systems, etc. need to be as simple as possible. They need to be easy to fix.

3) Dennis Tito is a man who earned my respect. He made a lot of money as an investment manager. He paid the Russians a fortune to give him a ride to the International Space Station. He conceived a daring plan to send two humans on a flight around Mars. He specified that the two crew members would be a highly compatible domestic partnership. For the first flight, it was going to be a man and a woman. Later flights could have gay couples. It was a brilliant idea! Such people would get along together well. They would give each other love, warmth, and sexual pleasure. I would add that the candidates for these places on the spacecraft need to have the most rigorous medical examination including DNA tests. We could not afford a medical emergency en route to or on the surface of Mars. I would specify that one crew member should be an MD with surgical skills.

4) Conventional wisdom says that we land astronauts on Mars. They return to earth. I advocate for a one-way trip. The people landing there would become colonists. They would start a new life on Mars and have children there.

     Some readers like Elena have a firm belief that we have too many problems here on earth. We should not be spending money sending humans to Mars. People from the space advocacy organizations will calmly and correctly point out that expenditures for space exploration are less than 1% of the US budget.

     I have an even better answer. An Oakland author named Mary Roach wrote a brilliant little book a few years ago called Packing for Mars. Here is the link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packing_for_Mars

    She put her heart and soul into the project. She went to Russia and trained to be a cosmonaut. She spent time doing training for the International Space Station at Johnson Spaceflight Center. She ended the book talking about how cold, dangerous, and unforgiving space was. I sensed that she was going to end the book advocating against the human exploration of Mars. She surprised me with the following final words that I will paraphrase now as follows:

        “If we don’t send humans to Mars, they won’t spend the money on social programs. What in the heck, let’s go ahead and do it!”

     I will leave you to reflect on that!

A New Space Race Coming

Space Pups-Good News About Radiation In Space

Space Pups

One of the many issues about deep-space travel is the problem of space radiation but a new study on mice sperm suggests it’s not really a concern, Science News reported.

Japanese researchers found that freeze-dried mouse sperm remained viable after living nearly six years aboard the International Space Station.

The team freeze-dried the reproductive cells of 12 mice to allow them to be stored at room temperature. They later sent the sperm to the space station, while also keeping a control batch on Earth.

After they returned to Earth, scientists rehydrated them and injected them into fresh mouse eggs. The newly born “space pups” turned out to be very healthy and had no genetic differences with their Earth-bound siblings.

Previously, scientists worried that chronic exposure to space radiation would cause cancer and other diseases in astronauts. They also feared it could mutate astronauts’ DNA, mutations that could be passed to their offspring.

However, the research team also reported that the space pups had children and grandchildren of their own, and each one was healthy.

The findings offer evidence that deep-space travelers could safely have children, but there are a few caveats.

The ISS is partially shielded from radiation thanks to the Earth’s magnetic field. Moreover, space radiation partially damages DNA by destroying the water molecules in cells.

Water is non-existent in freeze-dried sperm cells, which could make them resistant to radiation.

Sir Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos-A Tale Of Two Astronauts

Yesterday on the 52nd anniversary of the first human landing on the moon, Jeff Bezos and three other citizen astronauts took a suborbital trip into space. This came ten days after Sir Richard Branson and three other citizen astronauts ventured into suborbital space. This month has been a history-making month for human space exploration.

      Sir Richard Branson is a true showman. He turned his triumph into a fun party and some real entertainment for the millions of people watching. Jeff Bezos’ triumph was more subdued. Everything worked perfectly. It seemed that engineers were “running the show.”

        Let us do a quick comparison of Sir Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos. Sir Richard comes across as warm, friendly, and approachable. I have not had the honor of meeting him in person. Some months ago, he was gracious enough to send me his autographed picture. It showed him hanging out the pilot’s window of his space plane. (When Virgin Galactic shares slumped, I told Elena not to worry. I assured her that the autograph would keep going up in value.) Jeff Bezos comes across as very arrogant and distant.

     Sir Richard has been married to the same woman for 45 years. There are no public scandals concerning Sir Richard and other women. Jeff Bezos is divorced. He has had some scandals with other women.

       Sir Richard appears to be a model employer. There are no public scandals about him exploiting employees or treating them unfairly. Jeff Bezos has a huge file of employee complaints. This all led to a major New York Times expose some months ago.

     Sir Richard honestly and fairly pays taxes in several countries, Jeff Bezos prides himself on avoiding taxes everywhere.

NASA IS GETTING BULLISH ON NUCLEAR PROPULSION!!

Elon Musk Books A Seat To Fly To Space On Virgin Galactic!!

https://www.space.com/elon-musk-will-fly-on-virgin-galactic

Starship Design Changes

Is Starship In Trouble?

Will We Ever Colonize Mars?

Methane On Mars-Now You See It..Now You DOn’t

MARS.

First You See It, Then You Don’t: Scientists Closer to Explaining Mars Methane Mystery

Jun 29, 2021

This photo was taken on March 19, 2017, by the Mars Hand Lens Imager camera on the arm of NASA’s Curiosity rover. The image helped mission team members inspect the condition of Curiosity’s six wheels. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Why do some science instruments detect the gas on the Red Planet while others don’t?

Reports of methane detections at Mars have captivated scientists and non-scientists alike. On Earth, a significant amount of methane is produced by microbes that help most livestock digest plants. This digestion process ends with livestock exhaling or burping the gas into the air.

While there are no cattle, sheep, or goats on Mars, finding methane there is exciting because it may imply that microbes were, or are, living on the Red Planet. Methane could have nothing to do with microbes or any other biology, however; geological processes that involve the interaction of rocks, water, and heat can also produce it.

Before identifying the sources of methane on Mars, scientists must settle a question that’s been gnawing at them: Why do some instruments detect the gas while others don’t? NASA’s Curiosity rover, for instance, has repeatedly detected methane right above the surface of Gale Crater. But ESA’s (the European Space Agency) ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter hasn’t detected any methane higher in the Martian atmosphere.

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“When the Trace Gas Orbiter came on board in 2016, I was fully expecting the orbiter team to report that there’s a small amount of methane everywhere on Mars,” said Chris Webster, lead of the Tunable Laser Spectrometer (TLS) instrument in the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) chemistry lab aboard the Curiosity rover.

The TLS has measured less than one-half part per billion in volume of methane on average in Gale Crater. That’s equivalent to about a pinch of salt diluted in an Olympic-size swimming pool. These measurements have been punctuated by baffling spikes of up to 20 parts per billion in volume.

“But when the European team announced that it saw no methane, I was definitely shocked,” said Webster, who’s based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

The European orbiter was designed to be the gold standard for measuring methane and other gases over the whole planet. At the same time, Curiosity’s TLS is so precise, it will be used for early warning fire detection on the International Space Station and for tracking oxygen levels in astronaut suits. It’s also been licensed for use at power plants, on oil pipelines, and in fighter aircraft, where pilots can monitor the oxygen and carbon dioxide levels in their face masks.

Still, Webster and the SAM team were jolted by the European orbiter findings and immediately set out to scrutinize the TLS measurements on Mars.

Some experts suggested that the rover itself was releasing the gas. “So we looked at correlations with the pointing of the rover, the ground, the crushing of rocks, the wheel degradation – you name it,” Webster said. “I cannot overstate the effort the team has put into looking at every little detail to make sure those measurements are correct, and they are.”

Webster and his team reported their results today in the Astronomy & Astrophysics journal.

As the SAM team worked to confirm its methane detections, another member of Curiosity’s science team, planetary scientist John E. Moores from York University in Toronto, published an intriguing prediction in 2019. “I took what some of my colleagues are calling a very Canadian view of this, in the sense that I asked the question: ‘What if Curiosity and the Trace Gas Orbiter are both right?’” Moores said.

Moores, as well as other Curiosity team members studying wind patterns in Gale Crater, hypothesized that the discrepancy between methane measurements comes down to the time of day they’re taken. Because it needs a lot of power, TLS operates mostly at night when no other Curiosity instruments are working. The Martian atmosphere is calm at night, Moores noted, so the methane seeping from the ground builds up near the surface where Curiosity can detect it.

The Trace Gas Orbiter, on the other hand, requires sunlight to pinpoint methane about 3 miles, or 5 kilometers, above the surface. “Any atmosphere near a planet’s surface goes through a cycle during the day,” Moores said. Heat from the Sun churns the atmosphere as warm air rises and cool air sinks. Thus, the methane that is confined near the surface at night is mixed into the broader atmosphere during the day, which dilutes it to undetectable levels. “So I realized no instrument, especially an orbiting one, would see anything,” Moores said.

Immediately, the Curiosity team decided to test Moores’ prediction by collecting the first high-precision daytime measurements. TLS measured methane consecutively over the course of one Martian day, bracketing one nighttime measurement with two daytime ones. With each experiment, SAM sucked in Martian air for two hours, continuously removing the carbon dioxide, which makes up 95% of the planet’s atmosphere. This left a concentrated sample of methane that TLS could easily measure by passing an infrared laser beam through it many times, one that’s tuned to use a precise wavelength of light that is absorbed by methane.

“John predicted that methane should effectively go down to zero during the day, and our two daytime measurements confirmed that,” said Paul Mahaffy, the principal investigator of SAM, who’s based at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. TLS’ nighttime measurement fit neatly within the average the team had already established. “So that’s one way of putting to bed this big discrepancy,” Mahaffy said.

While this study suggests that methane concentrations rise and fall throughout the day at the surface of Gale Crater, scientists have yet to solve the global methane puzzle at Mars. Methane is a stable molecule that is expected to last on Mars for about 300 years before getting torn apart by solar radiation. If methane is constantly seeping from all similar craters, which scientists suspect is likely given that Gale doesn’t seem to be geologically unique, enough of it should have accumulated in the atmosphere for the Trace Gas Orbiter to detect. Scientists suspect that something is destroying methane in less than 300 years.

Experiments are underway to test whether very low-level electric discharges induced by dust in the Martian atmosphere could destroy methane, or whether abundant oxygen at the Martian surface quickly destroys methane before it can reach the upper atmosphere.

“We need to determine whether there’s a faster destruction mechanism than normal to fully reconcile the data sets from the rover and the orbiter,” Webster said.

News Media Contact

Andrew Good

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

818-393-2433

andrew.c.good@jpl.nasa.gov

Written by Lonnie Shekhtman

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

2021-130

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