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Tarun Sunkaraneni
Ms. Freestone
English 11
10 February 2014

Red, Home Planet

When the topic about the future of mankind and life in general is
addressed in everyday life, people more than often say that humankinds
legacy is to establish a new civilization outside our home, the Earth. Even
though these people are reluctant to recognizing and fighting the evils of
present day, caused by humans, the firmly believe that humans were only
meant to be created upon the Earth, not die in it. As much as it aggravates me
that people are not willing to take care of our precious environment in Earth,
but rather are interested in other alien planets to inhabit, I shall be doing a
research on what it takes in scientific terms to get the population of Earth to
occupy the red planet. While humans have dreamed about going to Mars
practically since it was discovered, an actual mission in the foreseeable future
is finally starting to feel like a real possibility.
But how real is it?
Humans play a key role in the biosphere, with the large human
population dominating many of Earth's ecosystems. This has resulted in a
widespread, ongoing extinction of other species during the present geological
epoch, now known as the Holocene extinction. The large-scale loss of species
caused by human influence since the 1950s has been called a biotic crisis, with

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an estimated 10% of the total species lost as of 2007. At current rates, about
30% of species are at risk of extinction in the next hundred years. Scientifically
called the Holocene extinction event, it is the result of habitat destruction, the
widespread distribution of invasive species, hunting, and climate change. In the
present day, human activity has had a significant impact on the surface of the
planet. More than a third of the land surface has been modified by human
actions, and humans use about 20% of global primary production. The
concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased by close to
30% since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

In the future, the consequences of a persistent biotic crisis are predicted

to last for at least five million years. It will result in a decline in biodiversity
accompanied by an explosion of species that are opportunistic, such as pests
and weeds. Microbes are likely to benefit from the increase in nutrient-enriched
environmental niches. However, no new species of existing large vertebrates
are likely to arise and food chains will probably be shortened after humans
deem the planet inhabitable to them.
The mission to mars is missing one crucial aspect of the journey: We
currently lack the technology to get people to Mars and back. An interplanetary
mission of that scale would likely be one of the most expensive and difficult
engineering challenges of the 21st century.
"Mars is pretty far away," NASAs director of the International Space Station,
Sam Scimemi said during a H2M conference. "It's six orders of magnitude

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further than the space station. We would need to develop new ways to live
away from the Earth and that's never been done before. Ever."
There are some pretty serious gaps in our abilities, including the fact that
we can't properly store the necessary fuel long enough for a Mars trip, we don't
yet have a vehicle capable of landing people on the Martian surface, and we
aren't entirely sure what it will take to keep them alive once there. A large part
of the H2M summit involved panelists discussing the various obstacles to a
manned Mars mission.
The good news is that there's nothing technologically impossible about a
manned Mars mission. It's just a matter of deciding it's a priority and putting
the time and money into developing the necessary tools. Right now NASA,
other space agencies, and private companies are working to bring Mars in
reach.

Before you can run you need to walk. And before you can do deep space
exploration, you need to get off your own planet.

While we've been sending people and probes into space for more than 50
years, a manned Mars mission would be on a much larger scale than almost
anything we've done before. There is no rocket in existence that can take off
from the Earth's surface and escape its gravitational pull to reach space
carrying the weight of a large spacecraft, astronauts and all the supplies and

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materials needed to get to Mars. Most likely, rockets would have to make
several trips to drop off supplies and pieces for a vehicle into low-Earth orbit.
There astronauts would slowly build the vehicle over time and then rocket off to
the Red Planet.

That still requires some heavy lifting. The largest construct assembled in
space, the International Space Station, has a mass of 4,500 tonnes and
required 31 spaceship flights to complete. According to NASA, a Mars vehicle
capable of taking people to the Red Planet and back would be smaller than the
space station -- around 1,250 tonnes. But our capabilities are hindered by the
retirement of the Space Shuttle fleet, which was capable of carrying large
masses to Earth orbit with relative ease.

Using existing rockets, aerospace engineer Bret Drake estimated it would

take 70 or 80 launches to assemble a Mars mission spacecraft. Considering the
ISS took more than a decade to complete, assembling a Mars vehicle would
require a very long time.

In order to stay alive in space, people need lots of things: food, oxygen,
shelter, and, perhaps most importantly, fuel. Somewhere around 80 percent of
the initial mass launched to space for a human Mars mission is going to be
propellant. Trouble is, storing that amount of fuel in space is hard.

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Objects in low-Earth orbit (the place you'd park your Mars spaceship
while you built it) travel around the world every 90 minutes. During half that
time, they experience the intense heat of the sun and then the unheated
blackness of space. That difference causes liquid hydrogen and oxygen -rocket fuel -- to vaporize. Unless tanks are regularly vented, containers holding
these materials are liable to explode.

Hydrogen in particular is susceptible to leaking out of its tanks, resulting

in a loss of about 4 percent per month. This means that if a Mars mission
required a year to assemble in low-Earth orbit, it would lose more than half of
its propellant before even departing to the Red Planet. At a cost of around
$10,000 to send a kilogram to space, that would be an expensive waste.

NASA is actively pursuing new technology that would allow them to store
propellant in space for long periods of time. Starting this year, the agency
hopes to demonstrate the capability for large, in-space cryogenic loading and
transfer. Such technology would be extremely valuable for a manned Mars
mission and could one day lead to the equivalent of a Space Age gas depots
waiting to top up a rocket's fuel.
In the grand scheme of things, engineering challenges are easy. It's the
social and political aspects of a manned Mars mission that are likely to be
toughest.

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No one knows exactly how much a human mission will cost but it is likely
to run to tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars. Adjusted for inflation, each
Apollo landing cost roughly $18 billion (12 billion), and a Mars mission would
be an order of magnitude greater in difficulty. It seems most likely that an
undertaking of that scale will be led by an international partnership. That
requires everything to be outlined in formal commitments between
participating countries. The only similar space mission, building the
International Space Station, required about five years for the countries involved
to hammer out their deals.
The plan would also have to be flexible. The world is complicated and multiyear missions need to cope with changing political landscapes and economic
downturns.
In conclusion, the main thing people should worry about now is to keep
Earth hospitable, because it might take a while to make mars home.

Bibliography
Bonsor, Kevin. "How Terraforming Mars Will Work." HowStuffWorks. HowStuffWorks.com, n.d. Web.
13 Mar. 2015.
"Risks and Challenges - Mission - Mars One." Mars One. Marsone, n.d. Web. 05 Mar. 2015.

The Last Man on the Moon: Astronaut Eugene Cernan and America's Race in Space
"We're Destroying the Planet in Ways That Are Even Worse than Global Warming." Mother Jones.
Mother Jones, n.d. Web. 12 Mar. 2015.

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