NASA Mission to Mars: It’s been nearly a decade since NASA, the pioneering US Space agency, last launched a manned spacecraft from an American base, but the next mission is getting closer to fruition.
A date at the end of May 2020 is looking the most likely bet, with the purpose of reaching the International Space Station (ISS).
This project represents a huge milestone for the company behind the mission, SpaceX (owned by Tesla’s founder Elon Musk), but what does it mean for human space activity in general? Could it lead to a Mars colony?
This article will take a closer look.
An intergalactic outlook
Elon Musk has seen the potential in exploring unknown spaces throughout his career. Starting out with Zip2 in 1995, he recognized the power of the internet, then just a rudimentary network.
The company’s aim was to share tourist information online—creating a predecessor to today’s online guide industry that now includes everything from finding hotels to choosing reliable online casinos.
His SpaceX missions are another example of this kind of thinking—there’s a whole solar system out there to explore and share information about, so what are we waiting for?
Musk has declared his grand objective of making humans a ‘multi-planet species’ within his lifetime, and SpaceX is his tool for doing that. This NASA-led space launch—known as Demo-2—is the next step of the process.
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Demo-2: a landmark event
It will be a historic moment: the first time a private company has ever sent humans into space. The launch is a hazardous task, which is why the enterprise has been working with NASA for the last decade to make sure their Dragon spacecraft can carry out the mission safely.
Named Demo-2, following the unmanned Demo-1 test flight last year, it will carry two NASA astronauts, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, who will be strapped into a SpaceX capsule fixed onto a Falcon 9 rocket.
The mission, if all goes well, will bring several short-term benefits. The first being contributing to the maintenance of the ISS, which has been occupied continuously for 20 years.
Sending the American crew will ease NASA’s dependency on Russian astronauts and broaden the level of expertise on board the station. It may also make future missions cheaper as the space company won’t be obliged to pay the high costs of sending the Russian crew.
Looking into the longer-term, a successful mission will pave the way for future endeavors—otherwise known as ‘operational flights’. About a month after the Demo-2 astronauts land back on Earth, the task force will send the four-man flight Crew-1 to the ISS, the first of regular SpaceX-backed crew operations to the station.
It is hoped that these will serve as a launchpad for more ambitious missions in the future.
NASA Mission to Mars: Mars on the horizon
Demo-2 is a test of how efficient the company’s spacecraft can be. It will serve as an indicator of whether their larger projects are viable, namely sending spacecraft to Mars, and possibly other parts of the Solar System.
In 2019, the company’s Starship was unveiled, with Elon Musk stating the importance of ‘extending human consciousness beyond our own planet’. He aims to make the vehicle reusable, thus cutting the cost of such missions and making regular travel possible.
This way, a possible colonization of the Red Planet is on the cards; something that would be a groundbreaking achievement, and one full of potential for mankind, according to the entrepreneur.
Earth’s rapidly growing population will cause societal pressures in the future, according to research, and making use of Mars’ resources may alleviate some of these.
Scientific knowledge is also a big factor, and it is thought that getting to know the Red Planet will lead to huge technological breakthroughs. Often, tech used in space intelligence can be translated to everyday human use—such as when a Hubble telescope algorithm helped the fight against breast cancer.
There’s also the power of inspiring future generations to consider. A Mars landing may inspire a whole generation of kids to become scientists and engineers, as space travel becomes the new ‘in thing’. A push of this kind would surely benefit science as a whole as the standard of human thinking is boosted.
A pandemic to consider
But before such grand ideas are entertained, the Nasa/SpaceX team has some obstacles to overcome.
Firstly, the Covid-19 epidemic raises concerns about the safety of astronauts and workers on the Demo-2 project. A skeleton staff has been working while NASA centers are locked down, with the project regarded as an ‘essential mission’, but even these workers have to comply with strict social distancing measures. Several staff was diagnosed with the virus after the first month, and the pressure is on the company to limit these cases in the future.
Astronauts normally have to be quarantined anyway, but the crisis has intensified such conditions so that it could cause a delay to the launch in May.
If the launch is delayed as a result, then there will be significant costs involved in its reorganization, as well as possible delays to future projects.
On a wider scale, the economic impact of the crisis might present further financial problems down the line, if procuring materials and research becomes more expensive, for example.
One thing’s for sure: Elon Musk is a man who normally gets what he wants. A global pandemic probably won’t be enough to stop his goal of reaching the Red Planet within his lifetime.
NASA Mission to Mars: Another leap for mankind?
Since the beginning of civilization, humans have gazed up at the sky and wondered what could possibly be up there. The one small step of Neil Armstrong provided some of the answers in 1969: could the Demo-2 mission be the start of an even bigger leap for mankind?
