Donald Trump presented his new NASA administrator with a bit of a conundrum: an unlimited check if he could plant the flag on Mars—by 2020.
New York Magazine reports that Trump was conducting a publicity call to astronauts aboard the International Space Station when his mind began to wander. Not only did Trump step out on his call to the space (a televised call) to make a quick trip to the bathroom, he also developed an on-the-spot “fantasy” of putting men on Mars before the end of his first term. The incident, from the new book Team of Vipers about life in the Trump White House, threatened to derail every priority at NASA and set the nation on a new space race whose only goal was satisfying Trump’s vanity.
During the call, Trump asked one of the astronauts about Mars, and was reminded that he had himself just signed a directive that set a date in the 2030s for human missions to the red planet. Trump, astonished to learn what he had already put his name to, was unhappy with this. Instead he replied that he wanted to make it happen “in my first term or at worst in my second term.”
The administrator attempted to explain to Trump the extreme distance—over 200 times farther than the Moon, even when the Earth and Mars are at their closest approach—and NASA’s lack of any vehicle that could sustain astronauts for the time and conditions that would be required. But Trump had an answer.
Trump: But what if I gave you all the money you could ever need to do it? What if we sent NASA’s budget through the roof, but focused entirely on that instead of whatever else you’re doing now. Could it work then?
it was a crazy thing for Trump to do. However, the honest answer to that question is … maybe. Depending on just what it means to put humans on Mars.
When John Kennedy challenged NASA to reach the Moon “within this decade,” it was the heart of a plan that was intended as a direct challenge to the nation, one that could provide stimulus, direction, and purpose. Kennedy first mentioned it as a challenge at the end of 1961, and returned to it in a more famous speech in 1962.
Kennedy: We choose to go to the Moon! We choose to go to the Moon...We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.
It was an enormous effort, one that didn’t require an unlimited budget at NASA, but one much larger than anything the space agency has received in the decades since. It also required NASA to hit an incredible cadence of launches: six manned Mercury missions, 10!more with Gemini, and five more Apollo launches before the first foot hit lunar soil barely in time to meet Kennedy’s deadline. From Apollo 8 (the first flight to ever leave Earth orbit) to the landing on the Moon saw four flights in under eight months, every one of them testing new components and new procedures.
And yet … on the day Kennedy made his speech, all of that was already planned. What Kennedy was proposing wasn’t something that caught NASA by surprise, it was what NASA had brought to him.
This part of that same speech gets a lot less replay.
Kennedy: But if I were to say, my fellow citizens, that we shall send to the moon, 240,000 miles away from the control station in Houston, a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall, the length of this football field, made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch, carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control, communications, food and survival, on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body, and then return it safely to earth, re-entering the atmosphere at speeds of over 25,000 miles per hour, causing heat about half that of the temperature of the sun--almost as hot as it is here today--and do all this, and do it right, and do it first before this decade is out--then we must be bold.
This section shows just how much time Kennedy had spent going over this plan before he took it to the public. He wasn’t running with a wild-eyed vision. He was proposing something that the scientists had already carried to his office. It’s the opposite of Trump’s off-the-cuff proposal for an instant Mars program.
But … could it work? Could NASA really get people to Mars in just a few years? Maybe.
Kennedy’s mention of a 300’ rocket showed that he was endorsing the plan that included putting people on the Moon with the already spec’d out Saturn/Apollo. But there were other plans. One would have seen a flight to the Moon using the lighter two-man Gemini capsule by 1966. That plan might have even gone forward, had delays in Gemini flights not allowed the parallel development on the Apollo program to get further along.
But there was another possible Moon plan, a plan that’s much closer to what NASA might be able to pull off should Trump push the program to launch or else. When Kennedy gave his speech, the Soviet Union seemed much closer to putting boots on pale grey ground than the United States. With issues, delays, and some spectacular exploding rockets, it looked very much like when—or if—the United States ever reached the Moon, it would be getting there in time to stop in at a Soviet base.
So a pair of engineers at Bell Aerosystems Company came up with a radical plan to get to the Moon, and get there fast. Their plan specified a very small, one-man spacecraft—a craft that weighed even less than a Mercury capsule. It would head straight to the Moon on rockets that already existed carrying a single astronaut with air, water, and food for just under two weeks. In the capsule were a suit for taking a walk, a battery to keep the astronaut warm, and absolutely, positively no way home.
In theory, this launch would follow a trio of others that landed supplies in advance. And more supplies would follow. So the solo astronaut could hike around these various landing sites, gather up supplies, build a shelter, and hunker down until someone could get together a better craft to bring him home. They figured this would take a minimum of two years, four at the outside.
It was a desperate plan, created against the very real possibility that the Soviets might announce their own Moon shot at any moment. Even so, despite still being significantly behind, the plan was abandoned by the time Kennedy made his “giant rocket” speech in 1962.
If NASA was really, really forced into it, they could probably do something similar to what was proposed by those Bell engineers: a one-way mission that got red dust on someone’s feet using a craft cobbled together from equipment on hand. It would be a mission that would leave the problem of getting that person (or persons) back on Earth to the next guy. But even that would be an order of magnitude more difficult than going to the Moon. It would demand NASA adopt attitudes and pacing even more aggressive than the 1960s, and adopting a plan that was considered too radical even to win the Space Race.
The challenges of reaching Mars are huge. Huge. That distance means more food, oxygen, fuel—more everything—are required to get people to the red planet. And they need just as much of most of that stuff on the way home. There’s radiation. There are the medical effects of prolonged weightlessness. There’s the sheer tedium mixed with terror of a space flight lasting half a year or more.
If Trump wants to throw people at Mars in the next two years, he could do it, but the odds of a successful mission would be extremely long. It’s an action that would only be taken by someone desperate for distraction, who cared nothing at all about the lives he was risking.
Hello, NASA?
On another note, private efforts to reach Mars took a bit of a setback on Tuesday as a storm toppled the test vehicle SpaceX has been building at Boca Chica, Texas. The “Star Hopper” was apparently not secured well enough to withstand the extremely high winds that ripped through the area, leaving the nose cone of the craft on its side and causing damage that is expected to take weeks to repair. This damage will delay testing of the craft that’s the first step toward the vehicle that SpaceX expects to use in taking people to Mars.