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By Root 1409 0

’s very hard to move on to something better. NASA has almost no resources to pursue alternative propulsion technologies. That money would have to come out of near-term missions, missions which could provide concrete results and improve NASA’s success record. Spending money on alternative technologies pays off a decade or two in the future. We tend to be very little interested in a decade or two in the future. This is one of the ways by which initial success can sow the seeds of ultimate failure; and is very similar to what sometimes happens in biological evolution. But sooner or later some nation—perhaps one without a huge investment in marginally effective technology—will develop effective alternatives.

Even before then, if we take a cooperative path, there will come a time—perhaps in the first decades of the new century and the new millennium—when an interplanetary spacecraft is assembled in Earth orbit, the progress in full view on the evening news. Astronauts and cosmonauts, hovering like gnats, guide and mate the prefabricated parts. Eventually the ship, tested and ready, is boarded by its international crew, and boosted to escape velocity. For the whole of the voyage to Mars and back, the lives of the crew members depend on one another, a microcosm of our actual circumstances down here on Earth. Perhaps the first joint interplanetary mission with human crews will be only a flyby or orbit of Mars. Earlier, robot vehicles, with aerobraking, parachutes, and retrorockets, will have set gently down on the Martian surface to collect samples and return them to Earth, and to emplace supplies for future explorers. But whether or not we have compelling, coherent reasons, I am sure—unless we destroy ourselves first—that the day will come when we humans set foot on Mars. It is only a matter of when.

According to solemn treaty, signed in Washington and Moscow on January 27, 1967, no nation may lay claim to part or all of another planet. Nevertheless—for historical reasons that Columbus would have understood well—some people are concerned about who first sets foot on Mars. If this really worries us, we can arrange for the ankles of the crew members to be tied together as they alight in the gentle Martian gravity.

The crews would acquire new and previously sequestered samples, in part to search for life, in part to understand the past and future of Mars and Earth. They would experiment, for later expeditions, on extracting water, oxygen, and hydrogen from the rocks and the air and from the underground permafrost—to drink, to breathe, to power their machines and, as rocket fuel and oxidizer, to propel the return voyage. They would test Martian materials for eventual fabrication of bases and settlements on Mars.

And they would go exploring. When I imagine the early human exploration of Mars, it’s always a roving vehicle, a little like a jeep, wandering down one of the valley networks, the crew with geological hammers, cameras, and analytic instruments at the ready. They’re looking for rocks from ages past, signs of ancient cataclysms, clues to climate change, strange chemistries, fossils, or—most exciting and most unlikely—something alive. Their discoveries are televised back to Earth at the speed of light. Snuggled up in bed with the kids, you explore the ancient riverbeds of Mars.

*Although in a few places, such as the slopes of the elevation called Alba Patera, there are multibranched valley networks that by comparison are very young. Somehow, even in the most recent billion years, liquid water seems to have flowed here and there, from time to time, through the deserts of Mars.

*Short for Shergotty-Nakhla-Chassigny. You can see why the acronym is used.

CHAPTER 16

SCALING HEAVEN

Who, my friend, can scale heaven?

—THE EPIC OF GILGAMESH

(SUMER, THIRD MILLENNIUM B.C.)

What?, I sometimes ask myself in amazement: Our ancestors walked from East Africa to Novaya Zemlya and Ayers Rock and Patagonia, hunted elephants with stone spearpoints, traversed the polar seas in open boats 7,000 years ago, circumnavigated