The United States has sent 5 rovers to Mars: when will humans follow?

WASHINGTON: With its flawless landing on Thursday (February 18), NASA’s Perseverance became the fifth rover to reach Mars, so when can we finally expect the goal of a manned expedition to materialize?

NASA’s current Artemis program is billed as a “moon to Mars” mission, and acting administrator Steve Jurczyk has reiterated his “mid-to-late 2030s” aspiration for American boots on the Red Planet.

READ: NASA’s Perseverance rover transmits spectacular new images

But while the trip is technologically almost within reach, experts say it is probably decades away due to funding uncertainties.

MARS IS HARD

Wernher von Braun, the architect of the Apollo program, began work on a mission to Mars just after the moon landing in 1969, but the plan, like many after him, never left the drawing board.

What makes it so difficult? To begin with, the great distance.

Astronauts bound for Mars will have to travel about 225 million kilometers, depending on where the two planets are in relation to each other.

That means a journey of many months, where astronauts will face two major health risks: radiation and microgravity.

The former increases the chances of developing cancer throughout life, while the latter decreases bone density and muscle mass.

If things go wrong, any problem will have to be solved on the planet itself.

“IT’S THE DETAILS”

That said, scientists have learned many lessons from astronauts’ missions to the moon and space stations.

“We have demonstrated in spacecraft in Earth orbit the ability of astronauts to survive for a year and a half,” said Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

The general ideas of how to execute a mission to Mars are in place, but “it is the details” that are missing, he added.

One way to reduce radiation exposure on the journey is to get there faster, said Laura Forczyk, founder of space consultancy Astralytical and a planetary scientist.

This could involve the use of nuclear thermal propulsion, which produces much more thrust than the energy produced by traditional chemical rockets.

READ: Mars ready for its close-up: China publishes the first image of the space probe

Another could be building a spacecraft with tethered water containers that absorb space radiation, McDowell said.

Once there, we will need to find ways to breathe the 95 percent carbon dioxide atmosphere. Perseverance has an instrument on board to convert carbon dioxide into oxygen, as a technical demonstration.

Other solutions involve breaking down the ice at the planet’s poles into oxygen and hydrogen, which will also power the rockets.

Radiation will also be a challenge for the planet, due to its ultrathin atmosphere and the lack of a protective magnetosphere, so shelters will need to be well protected, or even underground.

RISK TOLERANCE

Viability also comes down to how much risk we’re willing to tolerate, said G Scott Hubbard, NASA’s first Mars program director now at Stanford.

During the shuttle era, Hubbard said, “the demand was that astronauts face no more than a 3 percent increased risk of death.”

“Now they have raised that: deep space missions are between 10 and 30 percent, depending on the mission, so NASA is taking a more aggressive or open stance,” he added.

That could mean raising the allowable level of total radiation that astronauts can be exposed to throughout their lives, which NASA is also considering, Forczyk said.

POLITICAL WILL

Experts agreed that the biggest hurdle is getting buy-in from the US president and Congress.

“If humanity as a species, specifically the American taxpayer, decides to invest large amounts of money, we could be there by the 2030s,” McDowell said.

He doesn’t think that’s in the cards, but said he would be surprised if it happened later than the 2040s, a conclusion shared by Forczyk.

President Joe Biden has yet to outline his vision for Mars, although his spokesperson Jen Psaki said this month that the Artemis program had the “support” of the administration.

Still, the agency faces budget constraints and is not expected to meet its goal of returning astronauts to the moon by 2024, which would also push Mars back.

SPACEX WILDCARD

Could NASA be overtaken by SpaceX, the company founded by billionaire Elon Musk, which is targeting a first human mission in 2026?

Musk has been developing the next-generation Starship rocket for that purpose, although two prototypes exploded spectacularly in recent tests.

These may look bad, but the risks that SpaceX can take, and NASA, as a government agency, cannot, give it valuable data, Hubbard argued.

That could eventually give SpaceX an edge over NASA’s chosen rocket, the troublesome Space Launch System that’s plagued with delays and cost overruns.

But not even one of the richest people in the world can pay the full bill for Mars.

Hubbard sees a public-private partnership as more likely, with SpaceX providing the transportation and NASA solving the many other problems.