Written for Heyne (Germany) in 2005

 

MARS HOMECOMING

Terry Bisson

         

     We’re already on our way to Mars. We’re two thirds of the way through a long, rather leisurely journey that began over a century ago, a Mars voyage on a “generation ship.” 

     Like one of Von Braun’s early rockets, this ship has three stages.

     The first stage was the imagination, the booster, which mapped the planet in the mind, and dramatized the problems, potentials and possibilities.

     The second stage was dominated by machines: the orbiting robots and sand-crawlers that visited the planet and send back photos, like picture postcards from relatives on holiday: “Wish you were here.”

     So do we, and soon enough we will be. For the third stage is approaching the launch pad right now. Having landed both mind and machine on Mars, it’s time for homo sapiens sapiens: the original hunter-gatherer, the swiss army knife of big mammals. 

The problem is, this payload requires special meat containers.  Not only must the hands and brain be sealed from vacuum as they are flung across the solar system: the lungs, the bowels, the genitals, the teeth and hair and skin must follow as well.

     Rocketing liver and blood and hair through the void is expensive, but leaving them at home is not feasible. Imagination is infinitely divisible; robots are modular; but with astronauts, it’s all or nothing.

     Still, we must go, and will.

    

     Finding the connections between science and fiction is easy; untangling them is impossible. Scientists read SF. SF writers read science. Some play both roles simultaneously. It is a symbiotic relationship, though which is the vine and which the tree is sometimes hard to tell.

     It was an astronomer, after all, who created the most durable fictional structures on the red planet. Percival Lowell’s canals, though they turned out to be imaginary, made Mars real to millions, transforming the fourth planet from a point of light in a celestial sphere to a dry, dusty earth analog--a dessicated desert world that had seen better days.      A picture not far from the truth, as it turns out.

     Lowell’s canals have been mapped, sailed, and peered into by more readers (and fictional characters) than any of the planet’s “real” structures. They dominated the landscape, thiough with reduced flow, until well after the middle of the century. They watered the Mars of the Golden Age.

     The Golden Age of SF was all about space travel, and Mars glowed red at its heart—from Clarke (SANDS OF MARS) and Pohl(MAN-PLUS) to Heinlein (RED MARS) and Bradbury (THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES).          

The Golden Age, which ended abruptly in the 1960S, and indeed SF itself, can be seen as an effort by a small circle of enthusiasts to interest and educate the public about the possibility and the necessity of space travel and planetary exploration. And it worked. The kids (mostly boys) they educated and inspired are the same ones who run and staff today’s space agencies.

     Science and fiction were intimately entangled from the beginning. Wernher Von Braun and Willy Ley read Lasswitz (and Ley perhaps Bogdanich[sp?]) before they designed rockets. Arthur C. Clarke virtually invented the space station which is now wheeling above our heads. Heinlein (RED PLANET) and Dick (MARTIAN TIME-SLIP) wrote with the implicit promise that the wonders they were describing might come, would come, true.

And some of them did.    

`    Though it was NASA that made the dream real, we should give most of the credit for the first Moon landing to Tsiolkovsky and Stalin, for it was the Soviets who first entered space, pulling and then pushing the Americans to the Moon. Apollo confirmed SF’s cultish vision and made it the world’s, sending back the first photos of Earth from the Moon (grounding the environmental movement in stark reality) and planting the first footprints on another world. And we all know what happened next.

     Nothing happened next.

     The Cold War died with a whimper. The dreamers were laid off or told to shut up, and the space program was tethered to Earth--literally. Low Earth orbit became the new frontier, and Mars--the red planet at the heart of the dream--was all but forgotten.

     The Apollo program was shut down, the unfinished missions cancelled. The great Saturn rockets were turned into museum displays, and the blueprints of their F-1 engines donated to a Boy Scout scrap paper drive. It was as if Columbus’s caravels, after their triumphant voyage, had been dismasted and left to rot in the harbor.

 

     To many, the retreat of NASA from the goal of planetary exploration was a betrayal. It certainly took the shine off the organization; the Right Stuff had been replaced by a bureaucratic line-item checklist. As Geoffrey Landis, bestselling SF writer and NASA scientist puts it, NASA became an organization designed  “to create infrastructure instead of accomplish goals.” It was hardly inspirational. 

     Even Spiro Agnew, that sad old crook, had more vision. As Vice President he proposed a Mars voyage to lift both NASA’s profile and America’s spirits (and perhaps avert attention from his brown paper bag filled with money). He was turned down, and Nixon cancelled the space program entirely.

     It was, in sad fact, only the tragedies, the crashes of the underfunded, overaged shuttles Challenger and Columbia, that reignited any public interest in space flight at all. And it was the wrong kind of interest. America would rather mourn heroes than celebrate adventurers.

     It was forbidden to even speak of planetary exploration in the halls of NASA. Too dangerous, too expensive, too flamboyant. NASA was a low orbit space ride.

     But machines sometimes lead where men cannot go. The success of Viking, the mid-70s orbital and landing robots, sent back spectacular new images of Mars, superceding Lowell’s, inspiring a new generation of visionaries and reinvigorated some of the old ones.

     Viking showed us a red planet both new and ancient. No canals. No ruined cities. Just the deepest canyons and highest mountains in the solar system, plus water-carved gulches and wind-carved canyon walls.   

The peculiar (and wonderful) thing about science fiction is that the science always trumps fiction. Viking spawned a school of SF novels based on the new, real Mars, first and foremost among them, Kim Stanley Robinson’s award- winning trilogy: RED MARS, GREEN MARS and BLUE MARS.  The new images also brought hope to those devoted to keeping the dream of manned planetary exploration alive. Many were NASA employees, frustrated by the organization’s conservatism; others were aerospace engineers, biologists seeking the origins of life. Styling themselves the Mars Underground, they met every few years to trade papers, proposals and plans.

Mars was a passion, a hobby, an impossible dream; everything, it seemed, except an actual item on the to-do list of humankind.

`    Then along came Zubrin.

 

    

     Robert Zubrin describes himself as a “youthful reader of science fiction” turned aerospace engineer. After attending one of the “wildly exhilarating” Mars Underground conferences, he talked his colleagues and bosses at Martin Marietta into putting together a small task force that would design a Mars mission. He and David Baker came up with a winner.

     Mars Direct, as it came to be called, was a scenario based on the ancient principles of “traveling light” and “living off the land.” It did away with the classic hardware-heavy Die Marsprojekt of Von Braun, which envisioned gigantic ships assembled on the moon, huge crews orbiting Mars (and barely touching down), and budgets in the hundreds of billions.

     Zubrin’s plan was bolder, simpler and cheaper. It involved an Earth launch (like Apollo), with existing technology.

A robot ship, the Earth Return Vehicle or ERV, would be sent first, with a “factory” for producing rocket fuel from the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of Mars.  This was the boldest stroke, the heart of the plan, and the one that would have been impossible on almost any other planet.

     The second ship, also launched directly from Earth’s surface, would contain three to five astronauts. Homo sapiens sapiens. They land (aerobraking plus parachutes) near the ERV, which becomes their habitat for a year of hunting and gathering before heading back. Meanwhile another ERV has landed and is producing fuel for the next banjd of hunter-gathers.

     The plan was, as Zubrin modestly admits, “intellectual dynamite.” The Mars Underground loved it, but NASA found it threatening, since they were committed to the less exciting space station.

     Like Stanley, like Shackleton, Zubrin went public, and it paid off. As soon as his bestseller, THE CASE FOR MARS, was published in 1996, Zubrin was deluged with offers, interest and attention. He addressed the US Congress and was courted by Newt Gingrich, the conservative SF fan who dreamed of “privatizing” space exploration.

     The Mars Underground morphed into the Mars Society, which met yearly and drew celebrities like author Kim Stanley Robinson, astronaut Buzz Aldrin, and filmmaker James Cameron. As Carl Sagan, another convert, said: “Bob Zubrin really, nearly alone, changed our thinking on this issue.” 

     Zubrin’s Mars Direct scenario also attracted some of NASA’s more independent thinkers. Among them was Pascal Lee, a Chinese-born, French-raised, US-educated engineer, who was already conducting experiments with Mars-like conditions far above the Arctic Circle.

     The Haughton-Mars Project, on Devon Island, Canada, was designed to test human operations in a hostile environment. Lee and Zubrin joined forces, and with Zubrin’s genius for promotion and fund raising, combined with Lee’s knowledge of the arctic, transported a Mars Society “hab” to Devon Island, where volunteers from around the world could try living in a space the size of the Mars Direct ERV.  

     The volunteers (“Hard Work, No Pay, Eternal Glory”) wore simulated space suits. Communicating only by radio, they collected geological samples and repaired vehicles without taking off their helmets or gloves. They explored on ATV’s donated by Kawasaki. One of the few departures from the strict Mars simulation was the constant, if unobtrusive, presence of an unsuited Inuit hunter with a high powered rifle.

     Mars Society volunteers are not at the top of the food chain on Devon.

     Polar bears are.

 

     The success of Devon Island inspired another hab experiment in the Utah desert. The Mars Society was growing, even though NASA, still committed to low-orbit rides, showed no official interest. Meanwhile Zubrin climbed through the transom from science to fiction and wrote a Mars Direct novel, First Landing—-since optioned for film by Sam Washburn--while other, more seasoned SF authors such as Geoffrey Landis (A WALK ON MARS), Greg Benford (THE RACE TO MARS), Greg Bear (MOVING MARS) and Stephen Baxter (VOYAGE) were staking new claims on the Red Planet.

     Mars was beckoning.

     And tensions were building. Zubrin, like many strong leaders, made enemies. Some accused him of using the Mars Society to gain personal power; others claimed he treated Mars Direct as Holy Writ. Zubrin’s invocation of “Manifest Destiny,” in particular, gave an unfortunate chauvinistic tone to the entire enterprise which many, including bestselling authors Kim Stanley Robinson and Stephen Baxter, found offensive.

     Then came the dot.com crash.

Money dried up. Big dreams got smaller. Morale in the scientific community was “lower than a snake’s belly” as one put it. 

Then came 9.11.

“Somehow, it felt wrong to be having fun,” mourned one Devon volunteer.

     Rifts turned to rips. Mars Society membership fell off, and the alternative, Zubrin-free Mars Institute was formed. Both Kim Stanley Robinson and Pascal Lee found a home there. (Today Lee describes the Society as promotional and the Institute as scientific, adding generously that “both are important to the effort.”)

     Terrorism and war have preempted the great voyage, at least for now. But the dream lives on, and has even crept back into the White House. In February 2004 President Bush recommitted NASA to planetary exploration, promising the Moon by 2020 and Mars afterward. And though the timeline is long, more promising possibilities are already emerging.

 

 

In September, 2004, Burt Rutan’s tiny SpaceShipOne achieved sub-orbital space flight and won a 10 million dollar prize. Rutan’s ship was financed by Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen, who also created the Science Fiction Museum in Seattle. On landing, the pilot held up a sign: GOVERNMENT ZERO.

Privately-financed spaceflight, long a staple of SF, is becoming a reality. Internet billionaire Elon Musk, one of the Mars Society’s benefactors, is building the Falcon One to carry satellites into orbit. “This is the chance to fulfill a dream," he says.

Rutan’s ship carried a copy of SPACESHIP GALILEO, the book that first inspired Allen. Heinlein would be pleased. So would Bradbury, Asimov, Clarke and a host of others who first directed our eyes upward from Earth’s cradle.

SF Grandmaster Ben Bova is cautiously optimistic: “Rutan’s successful flights of SpaceShipOne mark the start of a new era in space travel. Scientific exploration of Mars will undoubtedly remain a governmental mission, although new ideas such as Zubrin’s Mars Direct should bring down the cost of human expeditions to the red planet by a couple of orders of magnitude.”

The cost is high; but the cost of not going is higher.

Arthur C Clarke, the dean of living SF writers, perhaps said it best, when he quoted from his own first book in his foreword to Zubrin’s: “The challenge of the great spaces between the worlds is a stupendous one; but if we fail to meet it, the story of our race will be drawing to its close.”

 

 

     The goals of tomorrow’s Mars voyagers are manifold, but first among them will be the search for life.  Or even the fossil remains of life. Astrophysics professor and bestselling author Gregory Benford, who replaced Kim Stanley Robinson on the board of the Mars Society, believes that the red planet may hold the key to life here on Earth. Because it is smaller and further from the sun, Mars may have cooled long before earth, allowing the earlier emergence of life. It could have been spread by meteoric impact, scattering spores into space—and to the nearby planets.

Life might have originated on Mars and evolved on Earth.

If that is indeed the case, the impending, inevitable manned voyage to Mars will be more than just another stride into humanity’s future.

     It will be a kind of homecoming.

 

    

    

The end