- Aldrin, Buzz with Leonard David.
Mission to Mars.
Washington, National Geographic Society, 2013.
ISBN 978-1-4262-1017-4.
-
As Buzz Aldrin (please don't write to chastise me
for misstating his name: while born as Edwin Eugene Aldrin, Jr., he
legally changed his name to Buzz Aldrin in 1988) notes,
while Neil Armstrong may have been the first human to step
onto the Moon, he was the first alien from another world to
board a spacecraft bound for Earth
(but how can he
be sure?).
After those epochal
days in July of 1969, Aldrin, more than any other person
who went to the Moon, has worked energetically to promote
space exploration and settlement, developing innovative
mission architectures to expand the human presence into
the solar system. This work continues his intellectual
contributions to human space flight which began with helping
to develop the techniques of orbital rendezvous still employed
today and pioneering neutral-buoyancy training for
extra-vehicular activity, which enabled him to perform
the first completely successful demonstration of work in
orbit on
Gemini XII.
In this book Aldrin presents his “Unified Space Vision”
for the next steps beyond the home planet. He notes that what we
know about the Moon today is very different from the little we
mostly guessed when he set foot upon that world. Today it appears
that the lunar polar regions may have abundant resources of
water which provide not only a source of oxygen for lunar settlers,
but electrolysed by abundant solar power, a source of rocket fuel
for operations beyond the Earth. Other lunar resources may allow
the fabrication of solar panels from in situ materials, reducing
the mass which must be launched from the Earth. Aldrin
“cyclers”
will permit transfers between the Earth and Moon and the Earth and
Mars with little expenditure of propellant.
Aldrin argues that space, from low Earth orbit to the vicinity of
the Moon, be opened up to explorers, settlers, and entrepreneurs
from all countries, private and governmental, to discover what works
and what doesn't, and which activities make economic sense. To go
beyond, however, he argues that the U.S. should take the lead,
establishing a “United Strategic Space Enterprise” with
the goal of establishing a permanent human settlement on Mars by
2035. He writes, “around 2020, every selected astronaut should
consign to living out his or her life on the surface of Mars.”
And there's where it all falls apart for me. It seems to me the
key question that is neither asked nor answered when discussing
the establishment of a human settlement on Mars can be
expressed in one word: “why?” Yes, I believe that
long-term survival of humans and their descendants depends upon
not keeping everything in one planetary basket, and I think
there is tremendously interesting science to be done on Mars,
which may inform us about the origin of life and its dissemination
among celestial bodies, the cycle of climate on planets
and the influence of the Sun, and many other fascinating subjects.
It makes sense to have a number of permanent bases on Mars
to study these things, just as the U.S. and other countries
have maintained permanent bases in
Antarctica
for more than fifty years. But I no longer believe that the
expansion of the human presence in the solar system is
best accomplished by painfully clawing our way out of one
deep gravity well only to make a long voyage and then make
an extremely perilous descent into another one (the Martian
atmosphere is thick enough you have to worry about entry heating,
but not thick enough to help in braking to landing speed).
Once you're on Mars, you only have solar power half the time, just
as on Earth, and you have an atmosphere which is useless to
breathe.
Even though few people take it seriously any more, Gerard K.
O'Neill's vision of space settlements in
The High Frontier (May 2013)
makes far more sense to me. Despite Aldrin's enthusiasm for
private space ventures, it seems to me that his vision for the
exploration and settlement of Mars will be, for at least
the first decades, the kind of elitist venture performed by
civil servants that the Apollo Moon landings were. In this book
he envisions no economic activity on Mars which would justify the
cost of supporting an expanding human presence there. Now,
wealthy societies may well fund a few bases, just as they do
in the Antarctic, but that will never reach what O'Neill calls
the point of “ignition”—where the settlement
pays for itself and can fund its own expansion by generating
economic value sufficient to import its needs and additional
settlers. O'Neill works out in great detail how space settlements
in cislunar space can do this, and I believe his economic case,
first made in the 1970s, has not only never been refuted but is
even more persuasive today.
Few people have thought as long and hard about what it
takes to make our species a spacefaring civilisation as
Buzz Aldrin, nor worked so assiduously over decades to
achieve that goal. This is a concise summation of his view
for where we should go from here. I disagree with much of his
strategy, but hey, when it comes to extraterrestrial bodies,
he's been there and I haven't. This is a slim book (just
272 pages in the hardback edition), and the last 20% is a
time line of U.S. space policies by presidential administrations,
including lengthy abstracts of speeches, quoted from
space.com.
May 2013 