Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and Tesla, presented new details of his vision for colonizing parts of the solar system, including Mars, Jupiter's moon Europa and Saturn's moon Enceladus. His bold plans - aimed at making humanity a multi-planetary species in case civilization collapses - includes flights to Mars as early as 2023.
The details released this week are extremely ambitious. But are they realistic? Planetary experts working to explore the solar system and the new ESA rover find them incredible for a number of reasons. Further from the first person.
First of all, let's not take away from Musk that he is a dreamer from Silicon Valley. He had tremendous success in launching rockets into space. The article offers several interesting ways to try to get to Mars and beyond, while he himself seeks to build a "self-sustaining city" on the Red Planet.
The idea is to make access to space much cheaper - the document states that the cost of travel to Mars should be reduced by "five million percent." Reusable space technologies will be an important part of this. This is a great idea that Musk is already putting into practice with impressive rocket stage landings on Earth. And this is undoubtedly a huge technological step.
Fuel production on Mars and beyond is also on the agenda. This will help keep costs down. Experiments in this area are in full swing and show that it is important to choose the right propellant. NASA's 2020 rover MOXIE experiment will show if we can produce oxygen from atmospheric carbon dioxide on Mars. It might be possible. But Musk would also like to produce methane - it would be cheaper and recyclable. It will take a complex reaction that uses a lot of energy.
Nevertheless, all of this is quite doable. But the plans are getting more and more incredible. Musk wants to launch huge spaceships into Earth orbit, where they will be refueled several times using stages launched from Earth in anticipation of being sent to Mars. Each of them is designed for 100 people, and Musk wants to launch 1,000 of these ships in 40-100 years, allowing millions of people to leave Earth.
Also, interplanetary gas stations should be on bodies like Enceladus, Europa and even Titan, where there could be or still is life. Fuel will be produced and stored on these moons. The purpose of these stations is to allow us to travel deeper into space, to places such as the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud.
The Red Dragon capsule is being proposed as a potential lander for such missions; it will use propulsion systems in conjunction with other technologies, rather than parachutes, as is often the case. Musk plans to test such a landing on Mars in 2020 with an unmanned mission. But it is unclear how feasible it is, and the fuel requirements are enormous.
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There are three important points that Musk does not, intentionally or accidentally, touch on in the document. Missions like the ExoMars 2020 rover - and plans to return samples to Earth - will look for signs of life on Mars. And we must wait for the results before polluting Mars with humans and their waste. The planetary bodies are subject to the "planetary protection" rules, which prohibit contamination of objects valuable for science.
Another problem is that Musk rejects one of the main technical problems of being on the surface of Mars: temperature. In just two sentences, he concludes:
“It's a little chilly there, but we can keep warm. The atmosphere will be extremely beneficial because it is composed mainly of CO2 mixed with nitrogen and argon with other elements, which means we can grow plants on Mars simply by compressing the atmosphere."
In fact, the temperature on Mars drops to 0 degrees during the day and -120 degrees at night. Operating in such cold temperatures will be extremely difficult for small lander and rover. In fact, this is a problem that was solved with heaters in the 300kg ExoMars 2020 rover project - but the amount of power required is likely to be out of reach for a "self-sustaining city."
Musk says nothing about how to warm the planet or compress the atmosphere - and each of these challenges poses a major engineering challenge. In the past, science fiction writers have proposed "terraforming" - perhaps by melting the planet's ice sheets. Not only will this change the environment forever, but it will also cause difficulties, because there is no magnetic field on Mars that can preserve the new atmosphere. Mars has been gradually losing its atmosphere for 3.8 billion years, and it will be difficult to keep the warmed atmosphere from escaping into space.
The last major problem is that nothing is said about radiation outside the Earth's magnetic cocoon. A journey to Mars and its participants will be vulnerable to potentially fatal cosmic rays from our galaxy and solar flares. Solar flare forecasting is in its infancy. With current shielding technologies, a one-year manned mission to Mars alone would provide astronauts with four times the safe level of radiation. Unmanned spacecraft may be harmed. Yes, work is underway to predict space weather and improve protection. This would alleviate some of the problems, but we are still far from it.
Regarding the upcoming missions: there are also questions about temperature and radiation when using Europa and Enceladus as gas stations - and there is no engineering study to evaluate them. These moons bathe in the strongest radiation belts in the solar system. Moreover, it is questionable whether these magnificent scientific goals, on which, perhaps, life will be more likely than on Mars, can be considered as "rocket depots."
Plans to advance to the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud have no basis at all until we put in the infrastructure. If Musk wants to create a new home for humans, Luna may be his best bet - and it's also much cheaper. However, high goals mean that we will achieve something. Musk's plans could pave the way for further space exploration.
ILYA KHEL