Learning From The Past

One of the reasons why the monumental achievements of the Apollo Moon landings were not followed up by further deep space manned exploration seems to me to be the strictly short duration of the explorations planned. The decision to go for a series of discrete short missions was of course understandable in the context of America's race with the Soviet Union to get men to the Moon. But such an approach could never have captured the imagination of mankind in the longer term. Until recent years, the most likely candidate for a possible manned Mars landing was another governmental, massively expensive, short term mission of scientific exploration. Unfortunately, that would have been subject to the vagaries of political decision making and I have little doubt that after a very few expeditions the program would have followed the sad precedent of Apollo into the oblivion of history.

Now however, the paradigm is clearly changing. The colonisation of Mars rather than a short series of exploratory landings has now been espoused by Elon Musk of Space X and the Dutch led Mars One venture. Crucially the idea that humans could be flown to Mars permanently to settle there has revolutionised the potential costs of putting humans on the Red Planet. Expeditions could avoid the enormous additional financial burden of launching return vehicles from Mars and bringing them back to Earth with all the crew members on board. The savings in research and development as well as fuel and management for the return voyage may transform the prospects for landing us on Mars in the relatively near term. There is now a chance that the first men and women could be on the martian surface before the end of the 2020's. The private sector may lead the way. This while a cash-strapped NASA continues to pour billions into a taxpayer funded deep space flight capacity. It may be that Space X, whose intentions are becoming clearer, will be able to develop deep space manned capability considerably faster and less expensively.