Stepping on Mars is the next logical step in the new era of space exploration, argues John Connolly, a NASA engineer for 36 years. Optimistic predictions expect humans to reach the red planet in the 2030s.
“It’s going to happen, it’s just a matter of when”, he points out in an interview with Tilt. Connolly now works on the Artemis Program, an initiative by the US space agency to take people back to the Moon and then to Mars.
“Human beings have always strived to overcome new limits, be it the top of Mount Everest, the bottom of the sea, the Moon or Mars. Exploring is in our DNA”, he believes.
The engineer is one of the leaders of the team responsible for the Human Landing System (HSL), which is like an “elevator” to place astronauts on the surface of a celestial body. Despite being essential for us to visit other places in the Universe, NASA has not yet mastered this technology.
This is just one of the challenges that scientists will face in the coming years to get the plan to conquer Mars off the ground.
What is needed to get there?
Somehow, humanity has already begun to explore Mars, with robotic missions such as the Perseverance and Curiosity rovers and the Ingenuity helicopter. However, future manned missions are much more complex. For them to happen, we still need to develop:
Special costumes and habitats: Mars is one of the most inhospitable environments in the Solar System, dry, dusty, icy, with toxic gases. It takes more effective protection and life support than anything NASA has ever developed to survive there.
More efficient propulsion system: Today, space travel uses chemical propulsion, burning fuel to generate energy. The goal is to find a system that doesn’t depend on a large fuel supply, and that even provides more power and speed. The bets are nuclear propulsion, by ions or use of solar sails.
Set the landing location: the robotic missions that are exploring the red planet can point us to the place with the most resources for a human presence. But this is still uncertain.
Moon is the first step to Mars
“Soon we’ll find life beyond Earth — and that will be us,” jokes Connolly, who once dreamed of becoming an astronaut, but an ankle injury from a hockey accident as a child prevented him from being selected.
John Connolly in São José dos Campos for the Space Studies Program 2023 Image: Marcella Duarte/UOL
The Artemis program has the ambition to establish a permanent human presence on the Moon, which will serve as a “stepping stone” to later send people to Mars.
“One day we will mine, plant vegetables and collect solar energy there. By developing these new technologies and learning to survive outside the Earth’s magnetic field, we will be ready to go further. The Moon will be our school”, believes the engineer.
But landing on the moon with a crew remains a major challenge, even though in the past 12 people have set foot on its soil — all white NASA men.
On Earth, which has a very dense atmosphere, a spacecraft can simply “fall”, being slowed down by friction. As for the terrestrial satellite, and in the future for Mars, it will be necessary to develop a robust landing system, with propulsion that actively “fights” against the fall and controls the descent.
new lander
That’s how NASA did the missions of the historic Apollo program, between 1969 and 1972. At the time, the Saturn V rocket sent a spacecraft carrying a lunar module (also called “lander”), coupled to its nose.
When approaching the Moon, this module disconnected, like an independent spacecraft, but with autonomy only to go and return once to the surface with two astronauts – a third was waiting in orbit, in the capsule. After the trip, the lander was ejected and discarded right there.
Apollo 17 rover and lunar module, 1972 Image: NASA
The old formula could even be repeated, but it wouldn’t make much sense for the new goals of space exploration. “We could rebuild the Apollo landers with a few enhancements because they were brilliant at the time. NASA created from scratch something that had never been done before. But now we are working on the next technological evolution, and the future prospect of also going to Mars”, explains the engineer, whose main attribution is to arrive at this new system.
The old lunar modules took only two astronauts to a very specific region of the Moon, for up to three days. It was the best they could do. Now we want to take more people, land anywhere on the surface, and stay there for at least a week, maybe up to a hundred days.
John Connolly
Partnership with private companies
The new era of space exploration has been accelerated by NASA’s partnerships with private companies – which did not exist at the time of the Apollo program – for the development of rockets, spacecraft and other technologies.
The new lander is one of them. Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin were selected to provide their best projects to the space agency. And Axiom is developing future moonsuits.
Plan A is for SpaceX’s gleaming Starship to be chosen for the landing of the Artemis program’s manned missions. However, she is still in the testing phase – some explosives. This is even the ship with which Musk wants to carry out his ambitious plan to have a million people living on Mars by 2050.
I believe it will work. SpaceX has a history of evolving its rockets quickly and is not afraid of failure. They destroyed the ship and even the launch pad in the last test, but they’re ready to try again. Can do in months what an agency would take years
John Connoly
Starting this year, we’ll also see small landers from smaller companies landing on the Moon — instead of people, they will carry a variety of scientific experiments that will help pave our way there. There are already 12 launches planned by 2026, within NASA’s CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) project.
But why go back now?
When I joined NASA in 1987, I believed that in about five years we would be on Mars, as it was the logical path. I think we should have gone back to the Moon much sooner, we’ve been trying for decades, but that involves many factors. Political good will, government money, a pandemic… Now we finally have a perfect moment, all the pieces are in place
John Connolly
For now, the Artemis program relies on the Orion passenger capsule and the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket, which have already undergone a successful test on their first trip to orbit the Moon, last year, without a crew.
“Selfie” of the Orion capsule with the Moon in the background, during the Artemis mission 1 Image: Nasa
In 2024, on the Artemis 2 mission, the trip to our satellite will be repeated with four people on board, including for the first time a woman and a black person.
“They will get as far away from Earth as any human being has ever been. But still without landing”, emphasizes the engineer. The landing of people on the Moon is only planned for the next trip, Artemis 3.
The idea is to launch the Starship spacecraft first, with SpaceX’s Super Heavy rocket: “it will arrive earlier and wait in orbit around the Moon. When we confirm that it is in the right place and that everything is working properly, we will send the Orion capsule with the crew, using SLS,” details Connolly.
The capsule will dock with the Starship in space, for the crew to enter – a maneuver similar to the one that happens on trips to the International Space Station (ISS). The large ship will then descend to the Moon and function as a “home” during the scientific mission. Then it will take the astronauts back to Orion, which will bring them to Earth.
Illustration of Starship on the Moon, with Earth in the background Image: SpaceX
NASA is literally hiring an elevator service. The vehicle is from SpaceX, and what they do with it afterwards is not relevant. They can refuel the Starship and keep it in orbit for the next mission, they can even sell tourist trips to the Moon. Or they can bring it back to Earth somehow.
John Connolly
When will we step on the moon again?
If everything goes as planned, humans will be on the Moon by the end of 2025. But that schedule may suffer delays.
The idea is to land close to the South Pole of our satellite, where there are permanently dark regions, with craters and depressions that can store important resources — in particular, frozen water.
Water is more valuable than gold in space. In addition to drinking it, you can make fuel and extract oxygen to breathe. Finding just a few mls of water on the Moon or Mars will be humanity’s greatest discovery. Someday, for the first time, an astronaut will drink in space a glass of water that did not come from Earth.
John Connolly
No human being or even a robotic mission has ever been to the South Pole of the Moon – which could change in the coming days, when Russia and India will try to land their new robots (Luna-25 and Chandrayaan-3, respectively) there.
This all makes the mission even more challenging. “We’ll need a lot of lights, for example on the helmets and on the rovers, because you can go down a lit hill but the other side will be completely black”, explains the engineer.
Incidentally, the next lunar explorers should be faced with a very different look than what we see in the photos of the Apollo missions. “We have in our imagination the Moon as a well-lit, flat, beautiful, white place. But in the South, the landscape is very dark, with long shadows, as the Sun is very close to the horizon”, he points out.
Connolly was in Brazil to participate in the Space Studies Program, an annual course of the International Space University (ISU), which in 2023 took place in São José dos Campos (SP). He has been teaching for 31 years at the institution, which has the mission of training the next generations of leaders in the aerospace industry. Around here, he talked about the Columbia Space Shuttle accident, as he was one of the leaders of the investigations at the time, and even organized a mini-rocket launching competition among the participants.
2023-08-17 20:02:14
#NASA #engineer #tells #step
