Space exploration has become, probably, the main achievement of mankind in the twentieth century. The interests of scientists and the military interests of the opposing superpowers coincided - and they did not spare money for space research. A loser in the battle for space could lose in the arms race. But in recent years, flights to near-earth orbit have become almost routine.
Now on the agenda is a new ambitious project: the creation of the first human colony on Mars. A private project led by Bas Lansdorp Mars One, involving the colonization of Mars, appeared in 2011. And two years later, the creators announced the recruitment of those wishing to "live outside the home." But this idea is more like a scam. What is hidden behind a bright, attractive sign?
In ten years, the first human colony will appear on Mars, about whose life they promise to shoot a television show. After the announcement of the recruitment of those wishing to participate in the project of Bas Lansdorp's Mars One, hundreds of thousands of applications fell on the organizers.
In 2015, one hundred Mars residents were selected. The current shortlist of the Mars One project also includes five Russians - journalist Anastasia Stepanova from Moscow, geographer Oksana Strelnikova from St. Petersburg, psychologist Yekaterina Ilyinskaya and two Russians living outside their homeland, chemist Vladislav Stroganov from Dresden University of Technology and physicist Tatyana Medvedev, who combines her dissertation writing at Princeton with work at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.
Many enthusiastically reacted to this idea, believing that such a base can indeed be built within the specified time frame. But, unfortunately, the Mars One project cannot be called any serious undertaking …
PRIVATE MARS
Promotional video:
The idea for the private Dutch project Mars One came about in 2011, when a researcher at the Twente Institute Bas Lansdorp shared his ideas with physicist Arno Wilders of the European Space Agency. The project envisages the flight to Mars of several manned spacecraft and the creation of a colony of 40 people on the planet without returning to Earth. According to the plan of the organizers of the project, the first flight with four astronauts on board was supposed to take place in 2022, but since then this date has been postponed twice, first to 2024, and now to 2026.
Applications for participation in the program were left from 2761 (according to the program participant Dr. Joseph Roche) to 200 thousand candidates (according to the organizers). In 2013, the first selection was made and the number of participants was reduced to 1058: 586 men and 472 women from 107 countries. In March last year, it was announced that work on a colony simulator was started, led by renowned Danish architect and space dwelling designer Christian von Bengtson.
After the medical examination of the candidates, 705 remained. In June last year, Mars One announced a tender for research activities within the project - research will be conducted in favor of the company that will allocate more funds for the development of the project. In February of this year, 100 project participants were selected - 50 men and 50 women, 20 of whom will fly as part of the first five expeditions and by 2035 will complete the construction of the first colony, and another twenty will form the second stage of the expedition.
The further selection program will include tests for psychological compatibility and the implementation of various kinds of team tasks. The selection of 10 teams of 4 people, according to the organizers, will be conducted until the end of 2015 and will be broadcast on TV and the Internet.
"BIG BROTHER" DOES NOT AGREE
At the end of February, representatives of the production company Endemol, known for the show Big Brother, said that they "failed to reach an agreement on the details of the contract, and the company is no longer interested in this project." After that, Lansdorp stopped talking about the regular live broadcasts of the project from Mars.
Lansdorp estimated the cost of organizing a one-way flight at US $ 6 billion. By comparison, NASA's 2009 Mars Manned Mission to Earth is estimated at $ 100 billion. By the end of February 2014, the project managed to receive sponsorship for only 795 thousand dollars, another 313 thousand were raised through crowdfunding.
Big projects are big problems. The project leaders announced that a separate contractor will work on each of the 6 separate program components. So far, only one contract has been signed with Paragon Space Development Corporation for the development of life support systems. The sending of modules to Mars to test solar panels, water extraction technology and the launch of a communications satellite will now take place in 2020. Lansdorp cites paperwork with investors as the reason for the delay.
The first flight is scheduled for 2017. It will be automatic, and programs for further launches will be worked out on it. The Mars module, based on the 2007 Phoenix project, is expected to carry 44 kilograms of payload to conduct research on the Red Planet. But at the moment, no contracts have been signed with the manufacturers of the filling for this module, and Bas Lansdorp declined to comment on when these contracts will be signed.
Last year, representatives of the SpaceX company, whose rockets are planned to be used by the project organizers, reported that Mars One representatives approached them with proposals to create a launch vehicle for the project, but noted that “the project provides for additional work on the Falcon Heavy launch vehicle. and such works are not currently a priority for SpaceX.
Space industry professionals point out that the project is very poorly developed and poorly feasible from a medical, technical and financial point of view. Many people generally consider it a pyramid scheme. The amount of $ 6 billion seems completely insufficient to organize a manned flight to Mars. The financial side of the project was criticized by some participants, saying that priority in the selection is given to the candidates who attracted the most funds to the project.
Former NASA employee Joseph Roche made statements to the press that the entire selection consisted of filling out a questionnaire, uploading an informational video, providing medical examination data, and instead of a complex test program, there was a 10-minute Skype interview. The young Irish physicist also said that despite the fact that he was selected among the final 100 participants, none of the project leaders have yet met him. Lansdorp, however, immediately made a video message in which he dismissed all these accusations: "The third round included candidates who did not contribute anything to the project, while the 100 lucky ones did not include people who donated quite significant amounts."
THE EXPEDITION WILL DIE IN 68 DAYS
The former scientific consultant of the project, theoretical physicist Gerard t'Hooft, also added fuel to the fire, calling a realistic time frame for the project.
“When I was asked to participate in this project, I said that they needed to add a zero after each digit: the project would cost tens of billions of dollars and would take 100 years to develop. But people are not very interested in what will happen in 100 years,”the Nobel laureate told The Guardian.
Nevertheless, t'Hooft still supports the goals of the project: “Let's be optimistic and see where this leads them.”
A group of employees of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in their 35-page report analyzing the technical side of the project, did not share the optimism of the eminent Danish colleague: "Planting lettuce and wheat will create oxygen peaks, which in a closed ecosystem will create incomparably high fire risks." At the same time, if you somehow bleed off excess oxygen, the pressure in the modules will drop and eventually reach a level that is impossible for free breathing. One of the solutions for this problem may be the removal of all landings in a separate module.
"It should be noted that the life support systems of the modules, which are planned to equip the colony, were developed for the microgravity conditions of the ISS, under the influence of Martian gravity, they will quickly fail."
In addition to these reasons for the projected failure of the expedition, the report also indicates the death of crew members from hunger (Mars One envisages planting 50 square meters of crops to feed 12 colonists, and according to MIT estimates, the required landing area for four cosmonauts is four times more), thirst and depressurization. According to the disappointing conclusions made in the report, the first expedition should die 68 days after landing. After the publication of this study, The Guardian reporters called the project "the most expensive mobile toilets in the Galaxy."
German cosmonaut Ulrich Walter called the project unethical: “The chances of reaching Mars are 30 percent, and survival longer than three months is less than 20 percent. They are going to make money from TV shows, and they are not interested in what happens to these people in space. If this mission were done with taxpayers' money, I would have organized a protest”. The astronauts were also supported by Islamic theologians: the General Directorate of Islamic Affairs and Endowments of the United Arab Emirates issued a fatwa prohibiting Muslims from taking part in flights to Mars. Islamic theorists considered flying in the existing conditions to be suicide.
THREE YEARS AGO THE RUSSIAN PROJECT "MARS-500" ENDED
However, many inhabitants of the Earth are ready to donate their money, their time, their lives for the project of mastering the unknown. And even the most ardent critics of the project consider it to be at least interesting from the point of view of the problems of further exploration of Mars and the resumption of projects for the colonization of the Red Planet. After all, more than one generation has grown up on dreams of space flights in Russia and the United States.
Ever since the Italian scientist Giovanni Schiaparelli discovered the network of troughs (which was later mistakenly translated as “canals”) in 1877, during the "Great Opposition" of Mars, no other planet discovered by humanity has attracted so much attention. While the development of observations of the Red Planet, the hypothesis of 1910-1920. gave way to more modern ones in the 1950s, humanity began to think more and more about the colonization of Mars.
Indeed, of the planets available at the current technological level, Mars is most suitable for this.
The first serious project for the colonization of our closest neighbor was proposed by the pioneer of world rocketry Wernher von Braun back in 1948 in his book "Project Mars". According to his plan, 10 spacecraft assembled in orbit with the help of partially rescued "shuttles" were supposed to deliver an expedition of 70 people to Mars in 443 days and return it back. It was decided to use hydrazine as a fuel, and nitric acid as an oxidizing agent.
In his work, von Braun made extensive use of the materials of Operation High Jump, a large-scale US Navy exercise in Antarctica in 1946-1947, in which about 4,700 people were involved. The scientist believed that the first manned flight to Mars would take place in 1965, however, half a century later, man had not yet set foot on the Red Planet.
Of the projects being developed in the USSR, it is worth noting the heavy interplanetary ship (TMK), which was developed in parallel by two groups of OKB-1. The first group was led by Gleb Yurievich Maksimov, the second - by Konstantin Petrovich Feoktistov. Maximov's project was based on the technologies that existed at that time and provided for the creation of a small ship with a crew of three. It was planned to fly around Mars on a flyby trajectory, without landing on its surface and without entering a near-Martian orbit with a further return to Earth.
Feoktistov's project was much larger and more complex. TMK was planned to be assembled in orbit and then accelerated to Mars. Considering that the flight with return to Earth was supposed to last more than a year, special attention was paid to life support systems - oxygen regeneration, the creation of a closed ecosystem close to the terrestrial one, nutrition and psychological compatibility of astronauts. The power plant of this project TMK planned to make electroreactive - this would either reduce the launch mass of the ship, or increase the flight.
With the development of TMK Feoktistov, changes were made to the project - it was planned to increase the reactor power from 7 to 15 MW and reduce the number of crews from 6 to 4 people. TMK was going to launch to Mars on June 8, 1971 - on the day of the next "Great Confrontation" of the planets, and it was supposed to return three years later.
The inclusion of the USSR in the "lunar race" led to a change in priorities in space programs, and the failure to test the H1 launch vehicle buried not only the Soviet lunar project, but also the Martian one. But the groundwork for both TMK projects was not in vain - they were used to create an experimental complex on Earth. And research and development on life support systems of the Feoktistov group were later used in the creation of Soviet orbital stations of the Salyut series.
Three years ago, the Russian Mars-500 project ended, during which six volunteers spent 519 days in a confined space. During this time, a number of studies were carried out on the interaction of the crew under conditions extremely close to the maximum flight duration, and additional medical experiments were carried out - cardiological, immersion, hyperbaric and radiological.
During the last stage, three exits to the surface of Mars were simulated; during the last of them, the cosmonauts even carried out an emergency exercise. Currently, NPO Energia is developing a nuclear electric propulsion system that can be used, among other things, for flights to Mars. A module equipped with a similar installation is planned to be built by 2018. The use of such engines in the future can reduce the flight time to the Red Planet to about one and a half months.
NOTHING PERSONAL - ONLY FINANCE
At the end of 2014, NASA announced the next revival of the Martian project. The agency's current plans are to send a manned expedition to Mars no later than 2030. Unfortunately, the existence of NASA programs is directly tied to the political and economic climate in the United States, and it is very difficult to predict the prospects for American long-term space programs at least for the next 5 years. The previous program, adopted in 2009, was completely closed just over a year after the start of work on it.
Until 2015, NASA employees quite rightly complained about budget cuts, but this year could be a turning point - the US House of Representatives, when considering the spending law, decided to increase funding for space programs by publishing a bill called Cromnibus. Under the new law, NASA's 2015 budget will be $ 18 billion.
In addition to states, some private companies and investors have also developed some very interesting projects. For example, the Inspiration Mars Foundation of the first space tourist Dennis Tito plans a manned flyby of Mars on January 5, 2018. Then, due to the relative position of the planets, a flight to Mars with a return to Earth will be possible in just 501 days. The flight dates coincide with the 11-year solar minimum, during which the exposure to solar radiation will be the least.
The Ames Research Center (NASA branch) is currently developing the idea to send future colonists in one direction. The Mars disposable spacecraft, which is promised to be launched by 2030, is only a small part of the Centennial Ship project, developed by the center at a joint initiative of NASA and DARPA. The goal of this project is to create and send to the nearest star systems a giant spaceship with colonists.
Who will eventually turn out to be Bas Lansdorp - a dreamer who is ready to risk his reputation and the lives of the project participants in order to realize the long-standing dream of mankind, or a cunning businessman who decided to monetize these dreams? Most of the project participants themselves are not very interested in this - they are already at arm's length from the dream of their whole life.
REFERENCE
RED RIDDLE
What do we know about Mars today? The day there is close to the earth, studies show the presence of water, the inclination of the axis is also almost earthly (which indicates the similarity of the seasons), the size of the planet's surface is the same as the entire land surface of the Earth. The average temperature on the planet ranges from + 20 to -180 degrees Celsius; because of the thinner atmosphere on the surface of Mars, solar radiation is much stronger; due to the absence of a magnetosphere, ultraviolet radiation is also higher.
The atmosphere of Mars is toxic to most living organisms on earth: earthlings will have to constantly wear special suits and build pressurized dwellings. In addition, it is unclear to what extent the effect of Martian gravity will be safe for the human body over time.
Dangers lie in wait for the expedition during the flight phase: unlike orbital and lunar flights, during a long journey to Mars, the crew will have to face completely different doses of solar radiation - and the task of ensuring the protection of the spacecraft seems at this stage weak.
Viktor SUKHOTIN, Top Secret newspaper