Revised SpaceX Plan To Beat NASA Human Missions To Mars
Making Life Multi-Planetary, Elon Musk
“We are targeting our first cargo missions in 2022 – that’s not a typo, although it is aspirational. We’ve already started building the system – the tooling for the main tanks has been ordered, the facility is being built and we will start construction of the first ship around the second quarter of next year. In about six to nine months we should start building the first ship. I feel fairly confident that we can complete the ship and be ready for a launch in about five years. Five years seems like a long time to me. The area under the curve of resources over that period of time should enable this time frame to be met, but if not this time frame, I think pretty soon thereafter. But that is our goal, to try to make the 2022 Mars rendezvous. The Earth-Mars synchronization happens roughly every two years, so every two years there is an opportunity to fly to Mars. Then in 2024 we want to try to fly four ships – two cargo and two crew.”
I am sure that the Planetary Protection Office at NASA had a fit when they read that, not to mention those space environmentalists who want to protect Mars from human pollution.
https://blogs.scientificame…
“Will Elon Musk Scuttle the Search for Life on Mars?
If there is life on the Red Planet—even just alien microbes clinging to
existence in isolated refuges—any biological contamination we import
from Earth could cause an ecological and scientific catastrophe”
“The strictest sterilizations are reserved for spacecraft visiting
so-called “Special Regions” on Mars, places where satellite observations suggest liquid water and other hallmarks of habitability could still persist. A rover or lander going to a Special Region would have a total budget of 300,000 bacterial hitchhikers, less than the number in a single square-millimeter colony dotting a petri dish—an amount that naïve back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest yields a one-in-10,000 chance of Earth’s bacteria gaining a flagella-hold upon Mars. Naturally, Special Regions would also be prime locales for any future settlers arriving on SpaceX’s super-rockets. But landing a single human in such places—let alone a million of them—would totally break the reigning planetary-protection paradigm.”
Time to pop some popcorn and watch the reaction.
On the other hand, there is the Moon, and 4 BFRs on bi-weekly runs could deliver nearly 29,000 tons of cargo, or humans, to its surface in the same 2-year time frame, enough to really jump start its industrialization, at a cost of $3.8 billion dollars for 192 flights to the lunar surface (assuming $20 million per flight with tanker launch included). BTW returning 19,200 tons of lunar material on those flights and selling it for an average of $8/troy oz will more than generate $3.8 billion in revenue. Moon Rock paper weights anyone?
As a reference point, the NASA SLS/Orion/Lander could probably deliver 1 ton to the lunar surface in that 2-year time frame for $2.5 billion dollars, assuming NASA even has a lunar lander by then…
Yes, space is about to have its Promontory Point moment when transcontinental travel time that took months, were limited to about 1 trip per year one way and payloads were limited to about a 1,000 pounds per wagon dropped to a few days with payloads of hundreds of tons possible per train.
Ultimately, NASA will have to face the conflict between its planetary protection rules and its stated intentions of landing astronauts on Mars. Unless they keep slipping the schedule for human exploration… I suspect they will ban access to the Special Regions, restrict or limit access to larger areas, and just give up on some areas near human landing sites and bases. That’s essentially the approach adopted in Antarctica in the Environmental Protocol part of the treaty.
But for the Moon Rock paperweights, those numbers imply a bit over 100 million, four ounce paperweights (around $25 each.) That’s probably more than the market would sustain. If you can create a fad for it, a million, $1000 Moon Rock sculptures might work better.
Yes, or bring back less and charge more for it, as with de Beers and diamonds. Of course this is assuming generic lunar material. If you find PGMs, high grade Tungsten Ore or some other high value mineral then higher prices per Troy Ounce will be supported, requiring less tonnage to cover the cost of the flights. But when you only need to generate $20 million per 100 tons of payload return to Earth you have many options for sliding down the demand curve for lunar materials and goods. Who knows? Maybe some entrepreneur will produce some fancy lunar coffee beans and sell them to Starbucks. Or maybe a lunar wine available in only the best outlets. ?
But also remember this simple business model assumes charging NASA or scientists from other nations zero to travel to the Moon for research or to build observatories there. Every few million dollars you charge them means less revenue has to be generated from lunar materials returned to Earth. The same applies to any tourists paying for vacations at the Lunar Hilton Casino and Spa. Such is the nature of transportation revolutions.
How are we supposed to be looking for any present day evidence of extant life on Mars when PP will not even let us visit the so called ‘Special Regions’ where life is most likely. It is really rather silly.
Maybe we should be stating that we are looking for ‘death’ on Mars instead of ‘life’.
Maybe they will bring a bunch of those flamethrowers that The Boring Company is selling and sterilize everything that way ..
All I can say is Good Luck! and I’ll believe it when I see it. The problem with Human Flight to Mars isn’t the rocket so much, it’s the negative effects on Humans, and I’ve yet to see we’ve solved those problems.
I definitely wouldn’t take those dates as certain, but Musk eventually seems to get where he wants to be with rockets.
After he lands unsanitized spacecraft on Mars, skeptics will always be able to claim that any life subsequently found on Mars came from his spacecraft.
NASA has said the will land astronauts on Mars in the mid 2030s. That would have the same effects as a SpaceX landing. (Any human landing is going to be a massive violation of current planetary protection rule.) Do you see NASA, or anyone else, resolving every Mars astrobiology question between the mid 2020s and the mid 2030s? If not, then NASA is planning to cause exactly the same problem you mentioned; they just plan to do so a decade later.
Having some experience with building hardware that complied with Mars MSL (it’s currently sitting on the surface in fact) and now Mars 2020 planetary protection requirements, I don’t think that protecting Mars from contamination and landing astronauts are mutually exclusive. You can do both. Definitely more complicated, but doable. It likely has a petty big impact on the bottom line. Knowing how cost conscious SpaceX is, someone needs to make a really good case to them.
I’m not sure I see how you could avoid contamination from an astronaut on the surface. Spacesuits and habitats leak. Not much, but some and I don’t see any way to avoid it. Existing suits have leaked at a rate of a few liters per hour. That’s air that’s been going in and out of a person’s lungs, so it has a decent number of bacteria in it. How many EVA-hours do you think it would take to violate the requirements for a Mars lander?
[Later edit] I think I answered my own question. The numbers vary tremendously, but a quick search for papers on bacteria concentrations in air makes 1e5 per cubic meter (100 per liter) look like a typical value. Any earlier comment listed 300,000 bacteria, total, as the limit for a single mission in a Special Region. Call it 5 liters per person per hour leakage, and you’d hit the limit after 600 person-hours of EVA work. That’s only from EVAs. The leakage from a habitat would add to that.
Mars2020 has a bioburden of around 130,000 spores for what’s landing (or hitting) the planet. Presumably larger hardware would have a larger limit. I’m not saying it would be easy or cheap. A filter membrane internal to the vehicle or suit may control it. It’s definitely a sea change from what we did on the moon.
The redesigns may be harder than you think, and eliminating leakage entirely isn’t realistic. The fact is that people have lots of microbes in their body. You can’t change that, and even if you could, some of them are symbiotic, so getting rid of them would be unhealthy. That means any leakage from a human presence will eventually cause contamination beyond an acceptable level.
But your comment, “Presumably larger hardware would have a larger limit” implies something very important about the underlying assumptions. I’m pretty sure I understand where this comes from. There is only so much you can to do to reduce the bioburden of a spacecraft. Without prohibitive costs, you can only push the number of spores per square centimeter down so far. Therefore, from a practical point of view, the achievable limit (in terms of the total number of microbes delivered to the site) is larger for larger missions.
Unfortunately, I’m not sure if that logic makes sense. If unacceptable contamination is produced by a delivering a certain number of microbes, then it shouldn’t matter if they were delivered on a small and very dirty spacecraft or a large and very clean one. If you set the standard for a really, really big mission, a hundred times higher than Mars 2020, because it’s a hundred times larger, you’re saying that it’s ok to deliver 13,000,000 spores. If that’s true, why did we spend all the time, effort and money on 130,000 from Mars 2020?
In practice, the standard seems to be enough effort to let us honestly say we’re trying to minimize contamination, and doing so without any clear or well-defined standard of acceptable or unacceptable contamination. And then sliding the requirements around to make sure we aren’t _too_ stringent and don’t require measures which are so expensive that they are a de-facto veto on something we want to do. That seems like a vastly subjective process, since it depends on what someone wants the Mars program to do and how much those people are willing to force someone else’s mission to spend.
A question then, Dr. C, and thanks for that rundown: Assume that we will settle Mars (actually live there, make babies, advance careers, etc.).
Now, plot escaped microorganisms (Y) against time (X). With time our curve will reach a critical inflection point where we can say that at that point Mars is ‘polluted’.
Following your logic, which makes sense, this cannot be avoided.
And if that is the case, why even make an effort towards sterilization? All we do is spend huge sums of money, and the end, no matter what we do, we will spoil Mars.
We can only move the inflection point to the right, and probably not very far, either.
Why bother?
I’m inclined to say “why bother” myself. But if there is any extant life on Mars, I wouldn’t want to drive it into extinction before we could study. Actually, I’d like to find some way of _not_ driving it into extinction. (Would wildlife preserves work for microbes?) We don’t even know if any such life exists, but limiting contamination until we can do an acceptable job of looking seems reasonable. We also want to make sure we don’t misidentify imported microbes as Martians.
But that doesn’t resolve the issue. It’s way too vague. What does “limiting contamination” mean? Not going there at all, to keep it to zero? As little as we can without doubling the cost of a mission (or should that be tripling, or a 50% increase)? What’s an “acceptable job” of looking for extant life? Some of that involves technical issues, but some of it is closer to public policy and ethics. If Mr. Musk’s schedule is reliable (I know…) we’ve got about a decade to make up our minds.
Two (now-obvious) points I hadn’t considered. And actually my question was more an admission of defeat that anything else; life being found on Mars, every effort should be made to understand and preserve it.
A tall order given our incomplete picture of Earth’s biosphere; and more importantly, our shameful inability to preserve it.
First large dust storm.
Hence advocating any manned mission should be seen (for scientific purposes) as “polluting” Mars. Hence if NASA wants to do a manned mission, they should be prioritising life-search missions for every Mars lander between now and then.
It isn’t clear to me a large, or even a global, dust storm would spread contamination over the entire planet. I’m fairly sure most of these storm start in the southern hemisphere. I think that means the dust is primarily lifted from that part of Mars and, once at altitude, later spreads over the whole planet. If that’s the case, then it might not spread contamination from the north to the south.
AIUI, dust storms spread by entraining dust at the leading edges, due to thermal effects caused by the differences in absorption of sunlight by the storm and non-storm areas. The dust doesn’t all come from the source of the first regional storm that seeds the global one.
You’d be heavily redesigning a suit anyways to work on Mars, so maybe they could improve on the leakiness. Same for the habitat.
And of course in general you’d want to treat any surface life findings in the vicinity of the human landing site with skepticism. I personally don’t think Earth life will last long on the surface of Mars, but it’s possible.
I’m not too comfortable with that. Yes, EVA suits need some major changes for use on Mars, and reducing leakage (both from the suits and the habitat) is always a good thing from a logistical point of view. But it’s adding requirements to an already-difficult engineering problem. That’s not helping. Also, you aren’t going to reduce leakage to zero. That means all it does is delay rather thank prevent a planetary protection problem.
Not zero, but planetary protection doesn’t have to reduce the chance of contamination to zero – not even Category IV. That would be impossible.
I was thinking of duration. When it comes to contamination from leakage from habitats and EVA suits, contamination will continue to increase as long as people are on the surface. It’s a constant, ongoing source of microbes, not a fixed number which were on an unmanned vehicle at launch. At some point, the duration of the stay times the contamination per day will be more than the current standards allow.
Take that 600 person hours of EVA work I guessed at. An aggressive surface program (by NASA, not Musk standards) might involve four people, eight-hours a day, three days a week. You’d hit that limit in a month and a half. If you reduce leakage by a factor of ten, you’d have a bit over a year. But you’d still hit planetary protection limit.
I doubt you’d land right in the middle of a Special Region, although you’d want it to be in driving distance. That would limit some of the contamination possibilities, especially if you took extra precautions (sterilizing any drilling equipment before sending it to Mars, etc).
However, you’d be continuously contaminating everything around the base/hab. Every piece of equipment that goes through an airlock, everything that gets repaired, everything that a human touches. Then you take those things into the Special Regions.
You might have sterilised them on Earth before packing them away for launch, but that hab is going to get pretty stinky, pretty quickly. Humans are filthy.
I don’t think it will be enough to sterilize it just on Earth. They’ll need a way to sterilize the exterior of suits and equipment on Mars as well. A combination of that plus using suitports instead of a normal airlock (but maybe keep the airlock in case it’s an emergency) would reduce contamination a lot.
Also, wouldn’t the microbes most people are breathing just die in the Martian environment anyways? Fcrary brought that up in another comment, about how by so aggressively sterilizing equipment we might be perversely selecting for microbes that can survive in harsh conditions. Whereas the bacteria living in human bodies often can’t even survive longoutside of said bodies on Earth, never mind a place as hostile to life as the Martian surface (those perchlorates in particular . . . )
I really don’t think we (or anyone) is going to find an engineering solution. You might find a very expensive way to let a few astronauts spend a few weeks or months on Mars without violating the current planetary protection rules. But at some point, some number of person-days, no matter how careful we are, contamination will exceed the current limits.
Which means, at least to me, we need to take a hard look at the current limits.
How many microbes does it really take to be a problem? These 130,000 or 300,000 per site numbers strike me as “we don’t know so let’s keep it as close to zero as we can, without canceling Mars missions entirely.”
Should, as you suggest, most microbes associated with people be treated differently than extremophiles?
How likely are imported microbes to spread, and how quickly will they do so? Can we have Special Protected Areas (to use the Antarctic term) and sites zoned for human activities? If so, how far apart do they need to be?
Can we, simply by genetic testing, differentiate between local and imported microbes? If so, do we care about contamination? (Or, are we worried that the imported bugs would outcompete and drive the local ones into extinction before we find them?) Or are we trying to preserve the local ecosystem for its own sake rather than scientific curiosity?
I think answering those questions are more likely to address the planetary protection concerns than trying to design a spacesuit or habitat that doesn’t leak.
We definitely need to do more tests as to how well microbes associated with people survive in simulated Martian conditions. That’s going to be the main source of potential contamination, so we need to know whether they’re likely to survive in such conditions, and for how long. If they consistently die off, then that would be promising for a human mission to Mars.
Thanks for getting me to look this up. NASA does fund this sort of work, but oddly, the usual information doesn’t seem to be online. Specifically NASA does have a program element in ROSES (Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Sciences) for this. C.15 is Planetary Protection Research, and the AO would cover exactly whay you’re talking about.
But the abstracts of selected proposals are supposed to go online, and they aren’t there for 2015 to present. Four proposals were selected for full funding in 2014 (and four more funded for one-year pilot studies.) None were exactly on the subject we’re discussing, but at least two were close.
Without all the information which should be online, I can’t tell how many proposals they’ve selected in recent years. Based on what is there (duration and expected annual budget per proposal), I’d say NASA’s spending between $2 and $5 million per year on this. That doesn’t include whatever they are spending on it from internal funding at the various NASA centers.
As I said to Brett, the extremophiles that survive NASA’s sterilisation techniques came from human contact, the spacecraft/parts weren’t sterilised and then exposed to mountain-tops or volcanic pools. That strongly implies that we all carry extremophiles under normal conditions, they are just normally outweighed by mundane bacteria/etc. So it really doesn’t matter if the majority of human-borne microbes die off easily if we also bring our own pool of extremophiles.
However, there needs to be research into which microbes do survive sterilisation. If there’s a ubiquitous family or families of extremophiles, then the “spore count” criteria could be changed to “amount of that particular microbe”. For example, it might be possible that there’s a handy indicator RNA sequence that correlates directly with extremophile contamination levels. That might simplify testing.
It would also be interesting if you could use a bacteriophage that [i]can’t[/i] survive in a vacuum, UV, cold, etc, but when preferentially eats extremophiles. Do a basic, low grade sterilisation, then spray the surfaces with a culture of the bacteriophage. No need to then clean off the bacteriophage, it will die in space. It could create a much cheaper way to sterilise landers for Mars/Europa/etc. [Edit: Oh, Brett already suggested something similar.]
I don’t think I share your faith in engineering the problem away. Admittedly though my skepticism is born of ignorance, so there’s that.
Oh. And the second anything of value is found on Mars all/any consideration of protection will be buh-bye.
In fact once the infrastructure reaches a certain point (some $ billions), again protection will be decremented.
Oh, sure, there will be lots of high-sounding talk. But money has momentum.
We are a despicable species in many ways.
And yet the only thing on Mars that would have value here is the discovery of alien life.
I think your inclusion of the word ‘only’ is too presumptive.
And exactly how would such a discovery be ‘valuable’? Our culture is already saturated with the idea of the possibility of extraterrestrial life. Confirmation of something that is practically already considered a given would hardly cause much of a stir; many if not all of its implications have been hashed out already.
Scientifically. A sample of second abiogenesis or demonstration of panspermia; an independent evolutionary pathway; a whole plethora of new genes or an entirely new biochemistry (depending).
An area that should be researched.
However, note Frank’s comment about unintentionally selecting for extremophiles when cleaning spacecraft, those extremophiles were present to start with. It wasn’t that the surfaces were sterilised and then contaminated with extremophiles, they were there already. Even though the object was contaminated by normal human contact before cleaning, there were enough extremophiles in the mix to matter.
Hence…
…I don’t see how this would work. What process would be cheap/easy enough to do on Mars to every piece of equipment that would be more effective than just putting them outside for awhile?
That isn’t quite what I said. First of all, it wasn’t me, it’s something I once heard an expert in the field talk about. Second, he didn’t say where were extremophiles left behind after trying to sterilize a surface. It was more like a speculation that there could be, and even if there were not, whatever microbes survived (extremophile or not) would be substantially more robust than the pre-sterilization average population.
There’s a big difference between a four or six man science mission where every piece that lands on Mars got prepped as payload, and a 100 person per ship per synod where the “lander” started out sitting fully exposed on the launch pad as the upper-stage.
There’s definitely a big difference between NASA plans for astronauts on Mars and Mr. Musk’s goals. But, as Moejoe wrote, the requirement for the Mars 2020 mission is less than 130,000 spores (viable microbes) delivered to a specific site. If that really is a meaningful and realistic limit for contamination, then the NASA plans are way over the limit and Mr. Musk’s plans are vastly over the limit. Either one is a problem if that’s the limit.
Not exactly. Other spacecraft landed on Mars were not 100% sterile.
Only the Vikings were sterile. All the others have ranged from clean to pretty dirty.
“Well, SURE Musk can fly and land on Mars, but ONLY the 25 billion dollar ‘Safe Landing System’ developed by NASA can make SURE any existing life is not disturbed!”
Sanitizing a human spacecraft probably isn’t possible, but back when Red Dragon was still a goal they said they were working with NASA to make sure Planetary Protection was accounted for.
As for life, I’d say the skepticism would mostly be if we found it on the surface. Earth life would probably not survive long enough on the surface to make it down into the deeper parts of the planet.
I might be willing to bet on the bugs. There are some species of terrestrial microbes which live (and thrive) under very extreme conditions. Water with a pH above 11 or below 1. Radiation doses over 100 thousand rad. (is there a typo in the Wikipedia entry on extremophiles? That doesn’t seem possible.) Some of those might get by on Mars.
And I remember something a former head of NASA’s Planetary Protection office once pointed out. By trying to get rid of microbes in clean rooms and on spacecraft, we’re breeding better bugs (my phrase, not his). You can never get all of them, and the ones that are left are preferentially the ones most able to survive a hostile environment. If you use UV light, nasty chemicals or extreme temperatures, the ones which survive are also the ones most likely to survive the trip to Mars and the conditions there. (Arguably, sterilizing with extreme heat might not breed for surviving extreme cold. But that’s not obvious; some subspecies are better at surviving extreme environments in general.)
That’s a good point about breeding microbes. In that case, maybe we should deliberately expose craft to bugs that can outcompete the extremophiles while on Earth, but which all die quickly on the transit to Mars as well as the landing (at least on the exterior of the spacecraft).
That’s probably going to be true for most or all bugs in human breath in the suits as well. They don’t even necessarily survive long outside of the human body on Earth, never mind somewhere as hostile as Mars.
Some questions needing answers (that I’ve not seen):
These extremophiles? Are they extant only in the extreme environments? Do the ordinary hordes on my fingers, or poop, share extreme characteristics when push and shove collide?
And those remaining 130,000 spores we are talking about: are these just the lucky few that remain after sterilization? Or are they a blessed species?
Now you’re asking a physicist questions about biology. I’m not sure how common extremophiles are outside their niche environments. As I understand it, they would probably not be as competitive than more ordinary species.
There is one thing I do know along these lines: Long ago, as a summer job in college, the USDA paid me to string up tanning lights in greenhouses. It was an experiment on how enhanced UV would affect plant growth. In the process I learned that there are strains of various plants which are very robust to stressful environments in general (the same ones that survive drought well and didn’t mind excessive UV as much as others) but those robust strains have lower crop yields. It’s reasonably to suppose something similar is true of microbes.
But for the few microbes which survive sterilization, it’s quite possible they are just the toughest fraction of a percent of the ordinary, preexisting population. Although there is debate about false positives and recontamination, the bacteria found on the Apollo 12-returned parts of Surveyor 3 was streptococcus mitis, which isn’t an extremophile.
Thats not revised, that is the direct quote from his last year speech we already know.
It is the revised version of their plan, as presented last fall. But it’s now been published in (I think) a peer-reviewed journal. The publication would be what’s new this month.
After Musk lands… well that is IF the launch lic. is granted….
It is unlikely that we will be able to discover live microbes on Mars until we do have humans on the surface, to run deep drilling machines to try to reach a depth where the microbes could grow in liquid water below the cryo-sphere. Even digging ice out of the subsurface for human use could leave earth microbes in the ice, but they would not be able to grow due to the intense subsurface cold.
In addition, our ability to compare DNA and RNA sequences in such great detail would make it very unlikely that Mars organisms if any would be confused with earth organisms.
If Musk can get to Mars sooner, NASA should work with him to plan for a deep drilling operation when practical to reach the brine layer if it exists and where live microbes are most likely to be found.
Exo-biology should not stand in the way of the exploration of an entire planet, which could support a future backup biosphere, enhancing the survival of all Earth life.
John Strickland
Exactly! If researchers are able to determine that all known life on Earth came from a single origin, and that a breed of Chicken in Peru was transported there about 900 years ago by Polynesians, determining if a microbe on Mars originated there or was transported from Earth in the 1970’s will be easy. But you need to get that microbe in the laboratory first to do the research.
I sometimes wonder if the Exobiologists are so busy thinking out of the box they are not keeping up with the research of the Earth focused biologists.
It’s not exactly about being too busy “thinking out of the box” but it does happen in most fields of planetary science. Terrestrial scientists (the ones studying the Earth, not the ones who are from Earth…) tend to have vastly better data than we can return from other planets. In a few weeks, a field geologist can get tens of kilos of samples back to a lab, and samples collected from many different locations. Mars, comet and asteroid geologists are looking at years or decades of work to get ten to a hundred grams. Atmospheric scientists can get data collected constantly, every day, which is much better than we’ve ever managed for Jupiter or Saturn. And astrobiologists may not be focused on genetic analasys of anything we might find, simply because we’re struggling to build planetary instruments with much more limited capabilities.
So, yes, there is some tendency to neglect advances in terrestrial work. It’s because most of those advances don’t work without substantially higher quality data than planetary scientists have available. But is a real disadvantage. Sometimes, we don’t pay attention and then when we get that quality of data, we don’t know what to do with it. Thing like cluster analysis and machine learning to identify transient events are old news in terrestrial science, but they’ve only started creeping into planetary science in the last five years or so.
Any crew that finds life on Mars is never coming home.
Under the current planetary protection rules, an unmanned sample return mission which might bring back extraterrestrial life would have real trouble. As a practical matter, any mission that discovered life, with or without astronauts, isn’t coming home.
They won’t send a crewed mission if they can’t bring them back even if they find life. Realistically they’re not going to be doing direct re-entry on Earth after coming back from Mars anyways, so you could stick them on the Moon base/deep space gateway/whatever for a few weeks to months undergoing medical tests to make sure nothing got carried over in their bodies.
To everyone on this thread: You need to read and study the concept of SpaceX’ plan for their mars missions. They do intend to send Astronauts on a one way trip to mars, but that will be only initially. They will have enough fuel to land, set up a living module, and then set up a fuel generating plant, which includes a power generating facility. This plant will need water, eg ice, from mars. Thus, there will a lot of both drilling and regolith moving. I am sure there will also be scientific study of the water derived from the ice for life-forms and other things. But the primary objective will be to generate enough fuel to return home from mars. There will be enough supplies to last the two year window in case this takes longer than expected, then additional supplies can be sent. And yes, there will be direct re-entry. That is the plan. So saying that whoever discovers life on mars isn’t coming home is maybe a misinformed opinion.
“real trouble”
What an understatement! The press would be all over this one! The NASA boys would have an awful lot of backpedaling to do.
The length of the trip home exceeds the returning astronaut quarantine period established for Apollo, by several times over.
I don’t think they are trying to “beat NASA Human Missions to Mars”. I think they are trying to be a catalyst to enable those missions. I think that SpaceX would dearly love to partner with NASA to get humans to mars, and have NASA help with all the infrastructure needed once that is accomplished (leaving the transportation to SpaceX). However, I don’t think they want to relinquish control of the timetable, for the simple reason that NASA has not demonstrated (since Apollo, at least) that they are capable in that particular detail. Now is a very opportune time for them both to sign a memorandum of understanding regarding who is responsible for what (transportation vs. settlement).
Fair warning, this is basically word for word from a similar draft Musk published about a month after IAC 2017. Comments from Shotwell in Musk in the last two months are better guides at this point.
Do you think Congress will pass some law/regulation about restriction on microbial cleanliness levels for any vehicle landing on Mars; driving up the costs on Space X.
The Outer Space Treaty requires that you take steps on planetary protection, and you probably wouldn’t be able to get a launch license in the US if you were ignoring it on a Mars mission. Only way around that would be to launch from a country that is either not party to the Outer Space Treaty (or willing to ignore it).
Laws tend to be a little ambiguous, and international treaties are even more so. All the Outer Space Treaty is that:
“ States Parties to the Treaty shall pursue studies of outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, and conduct exploration of them so as to avoid their harmful contamination and also adverse changes in the environment of the Earth resulting from the introduction of extraterrestrial matter and, where necessary, shall adopt appropriate measures for this purpose.”
When it comes to figuring out what that means, the signatory nations have agreed to let an international organization, COSPAR, fill in the details. But even the COSPAR guidelines aren’t detailed enough to say exactly what a particular mission needs to do. That’s up to the governments of the signatory nations. In the case of the US, NASA’s planetary protection office for government missions and who knows what for private ones, since that’s never come up.
Russia’s opinions about how to follow COSPAR guidelines may be very different from NASAs. An act of Congress could direct NASA to interpret those guidelines differently. Even ignoring COSPAR wouldn’t be a violation of the Outer Space Treaty itself, since the treaty doesn’t name COSPAR. So there’s lots of wiggle room for a country wants to use it.
So…while SLS EM-2 is warming up on the pad to deliver the first componant of the Lunar Orbital Outpost, a human-capable spacecraft built by SpaceX will be at Mars and maybe even on the surface.