On the other hand, astronaut Chris Hadfield is skeptical: “Humanity is not going extinct,” he told me. He added: “There’s no great compelling reason to go, apart from curiosity, and that’s not going to be enough to sustain the immense cost necessary with the technology that exists right now.”
But I question our future, stuck here on Earth. Our environment is a highly balanced system and we are the destabilizing element. Pursuing “green” initiatives is no long-term solution to the wall we’re hurtling towards, they’re speed bumps. If this is where humankind is destined to remain, then we shall find ourselves fighting over whatever is left of it.
Politically speaking, sending humans into space brings nations together — the International Space Station stood as the physical manifestation of the reunification of the USA and Russia and is now a platform for broader international cooperation.
Space exploration is also inspiring: during NASA’s Apollo program to the Moon, the number of graduates in mathematics, engineering and the sciences in the US doubled. Igniting the imagination of that generation helped propel the US into the dominant position it’s held since the 1960s. What could a Mars program do?
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Psychology: Depending on relative orbits, sending a message between Earth and Mars can take between three and 22 minutes. This loss of real-time communication will leave astronauts feeling cut-off and alone. Hadfield says that it’s vital to keep up crew morale and motivation: “Once you get any distance away on any sort of voyage, the epic-ness disappears, the reality becomes the foreground, and the applause is long gone.”
Cost: A crewed Mars program would cost the equivalent of a few weeks of the U.S. defense budget. The US plans on spending about 10 times more on nuclear weapons than on space exploration over the coming decade. The UK government spends about as much on gastric band surgery through the NHS as it does on its space activities.
So while a Mars program certainly has challenges to overcome, the technological gap between us and Mars is far smaller than it was for the Moon program in the 1960s. And the prospects the Red Planet holds for humanity are far greater.
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