Mission to Mars: Bad science fiction

0:05Mars was empty before we came. That's not to say that nothing had ever happened. The planet had accreted, melted, rolled and cooled, leaving a surface scarred by enormous geological features, craters, canyons, volcanoes. The planet Mars, as imagined and read by science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson. There were no witnesses, except for us, looking from the planet next door. We are all the consciousness that Mars has ever had. His Mars trilogy, published in the 1990s, tells the tale of the human race settling on the Red Planet and transforming its rocky, lifeless terrain into a lush planet of trees, lakes, and rivers.

0:51Tales are told to give Mars life or to bring it to life because we are still those animals who survived the Ice Age and looked up at the night sky in wonder and told stories. and Mars has never ceased to be what it was to us from our very beginning. A great sign, a great symbol, a great power. Stories like this have inspired generations of researchers, scientists, and engineers to wonder what it might be like to fly to Mars, to land on its surface, to walk amid its rocks and dust. And some advocates of red planet exploration want to go further, to settle on Mars, to build cities on Mars, to make Mars a home.

1:38And so we came here. It had been a power. Now it became a place.

1:50This is Tectonic from the Financial Times. I'm Peggy Hollinger, the FT's space industry editor. And in this series, I'm exploring man's mission to land and live on Mars. For the past 50 years, humans have been sending probes to the Red Planet to study its surface. Landers and rovers have analyzed Martian air and soil, measured solar winds, and found evidence that water and even life may once have existed. Of course, no human has actually been there. But let's imagine we do land on Mars. What would it be like? Could humans live on Mars? Or is that idea more fiction than fact? Mission to Mars, Part 3.

2:41Bad Science Fiction.

2:47In an air-conditioned hangar in the suburbs of Houston, Texas, they're preparing for life on another planet. So welcome to CHAPIA. It's the Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog. Suzanne Bell works on CHAPIA, a series of missions that take place in a purpose-built Martian habitat at NASA's Johnson Space Center. CHAPIA is designed as a series of one-year missions where we put crews in isolation and confinement for 378 days. And what we're doing is operational evaluation of their human health and performance in Mars resource-restricted environment. From the outside, this habitat does look kind of otherworldly.

3:29It's a large one-story block made of a material called lavacrete, concrete mixed with volcanic rock, oozed out of the tubes of a 3D printing machine. We set out to use whatever technologies we're expected to use for Mars. So Chapia was actually 3D printed, mimicking how we might make a habitat on Mars from the Mars regolith or soil. Inside is a maze of small rooms. On the left are four bedrooms, each with a single bed, a desk and a chair, and a space to store some clothes. When you live in long-term isolation and confinement, you live and work together and never go home at night. So it's important to have a private space.

4:13On the right, there's a toilet and shower. Down the corridor, a large communal room with a kitchen, dining table, some comfy chairs, a few board games, and a wall-mounted flat screen. Because we mimic the communication delay expected for Mars, they can't do things like streaming services or use the internet or things like that. However, they are allowed some video games, some movies, some recreational activities, similar to what a crew might be able to bring with them on Mars. One small team of recruits has already spent a year living here. A new team is due to replace them in a few weeks. In our kitchen prep area, you'll notice it looks a little different from your kitchen at home.

4:52For example, there's no stove, oven or microwave. You can simply heat your water and rehydrate your food that you'll be eating for 378 days. Rehydrate your food. The assumption is that anyone living on Mars will be eating prepackaged long-life food, maybe supplemented with vegetables grown inside the habitat. We are in their crop growth area for the crew. Chipia Mission One was able to successfully grow three types of crops, including tomatoes and leafy greens. We don't currently have the technologies to be able to grow large crops on the Martian surface. However, some crop growth can be an important component not only for behavioral health and connection to Earth, but also to stimulate their eating.

5:39Having some fresh food might be important if you have nothing but space rations for months or years on end. Imagine being able to grow lettuce and putting it around food that's been rehydrated and giving you some crunch and texture that helps you eat over time. Delicious. The complex has a fitness room and areas where the crew can work and carry out experiments. And at the far end, the closest thing the crew has to a front door. Okay, so we are currently in the airlock before we step outside into the Martian surface. An important part of the schedule that the four participants will do is to do spacewalks.

6:18In this area, they will don or put on their spacesuits as well as their helmets before they go and do the spacewalks. And welcome to Mars!

6:36The crew members step out into a small covered area, surrounded by walls covered in printed Martian landscapes. The sand beneath their feet dyed red. So far, this is the closest NASA and the crew at Chappia have got to experiencing life on the Red Planet. Participants carry out tasks they might undertake on a Mars mission, like finding and examining rock samples or operating robots. But the real experiment is being run on them. CHAPIA is one of several Mars simulations around the world. Scientists run projects in remote parts of Canada, the US, Jordan and Australia, each designed to replicate some of the challenges and pressures any early inhabitants of Mars might face.

7:27Some simulations last only a couple of weeks. Others, like CHAPIA, can last for more than a year. Participants live in confined spaces with a raft of restrictions that present numerous challenges. As well as the physical discomforts, researchers also want to see how people cope with the mental pressures. My name is Christiane Heinicke and I'm at the Center of Applied Space Technology and Microgravity at the University of Bremen. And my research focus is on extraterrestrial habitation, so anything that is necessary to keep humans alive on the Moon or on Mars. Christiana Heineke's day job is designing off-planet habitats.

8:12But she's also spent more time living in Mars simulations than almost anyone else. The most prominent one is HICES-4, which is a mission to simulate life on Mars for one year together with five other people. So we were six people in total. And we were living on a volcano in Hawaii, very remote, very barren landscape. So it really looked like on Mars. We couldn't see the ocean. And we were only allowed to go outside wearing mock spacesuits. In many ways, the daily routine in one of these simulations is remarkably close to home. Generally, a day on Mars looks surprisingly similar to a day on Earth.

8:57At some point, you get up, you have breakfast, do your work, then you have lunch. Again, you do some more work, you have dinner, and then you go to bed. Normal housekeeping has to be done. So you have to clean, you have to cook, you have to do laundry. We had our own projects that we worked on. Some were working on scientific projects. Some were learning languages. Some people ran marathons on the treadmill. But some of the more quotidian pleasures of life are out of reach. The things that really are different is you don't go outside, you know, just for fun for a couple of minutes. You can go for a walk in the forest, just donning the suit and going through the airlock.

9:44That takes a substantial amount of time. You don't just, you know, enjoy a few minutes of sunshine and go back inside. In such a restricted environment, Heineke said the crew would take any opportunity to liven things up. So, for example, celebrating Thanksgiving, everyone wants to have the leg of the turkey, because that's the best part, apparently. And because we didn't have turkeys, but we had freeze-dried turkey meat, little cubes of meat. And to me, it was like magic. But the others, they somehow managed to put these cubes together. And so they made a shape, a turkey shape, but the turkey didn't have two legs, but it had six legs.

10:26So a leg for every single crew member. We talked about the six leg turkey for quite a long time. Happy Thanksgiving. And then there was the day they got to eat a tomato. Then there was this celebration of when we had our first tomato harvest. And it was a teeny tiny tomato. So our French crew member, so he did the harvest. He prepared French cuisine and then he prepared the plates. Everyone had one single tomato or some dried basil and it looked like in a fancy restaurant. And then we had a dress code for the day. It was our holiday, you know, we gave it a special name. We called it Jour de la Tomate.

11:07And the dress code was that nobody was allowed to wear red because you really wanted to bring out the red of the tomatoes and to really stand out. And you wouldn't believe in how many, even tinier pieces, you can cut a tiny tomato just to be able to savor the taste and also the texture for as long as possible. I mean, they were tiny, but these were the best tomatoes I've ever had in my entire life. But for Heineke, the isolation of living in the simulation started to take its toll. She had five crewmates for company and the year to spend with them. So the biggest challenge really, it is psychology.

11:50So you're isolated, you're in confinement, you're alone on Mars with your crew. You know, if you're inviting someone to your birthday party, you will have five guests and that's it. At some point, you know, you kind of miss having a conversation, you know, a real conversation with someone outside your crew because, I mean, obviously you talk to your crewmates, But, you know, after a couple of weeks, you start being able to predict what they're going to say, even if you're having an argument. Sometimes I felt like, why are we having this argument? I already know what you're going to say. And the thing is, during these really long-duration missions, you know, if there's a small issue in the beginning, some small discrepancy between people, it's not going to go away.

12:39Isolation from loved ones, almost no fresh food, never being able to walk outside in a forest. The picture she's painting of life on Mars is not exactly rosy. So would Heineke ever consider going to Mars for real? Oh yeah, I would. You know, you're on a different planet, isn't that kind of cool? You have these places where nobody else has been before. You know, you have a different landscape, you have a different environment. You can do things that you cannot do on Earth. The gravity is lower, so you can jump higher, you can do fun things. It's an experience, it's cool, come on. I mean, why are we going to Mars?

13:23Not because of all the things that are named that you cannot do and that are tedious, but because of the things that are cool and that you can do and because it's exciting to be in a different place. Researchers say these simulations are useful for studying how early voyagers to Mars will deal with the conditions, and with each other. But whether your simulation is in Armenia or Antarctica, or a volcano in Hawaii, it's still Earth. And some people, those who have actually been into space, say that might not be the same as flying for months to a distant planet you might never return from. My name is Michael Lopez-Alegria.

14:08I'm the chief astronaut at Axiom Space. Axiom is a private company that trains astronauts and is also building its own space station. Lopez-Alegria, known in the space world as MLA, has gone into space twice as an Axiom astronaut, and a few times before that. I spent 20 years as a NASA astronaut from 1992 to 2012. I flew on three space shuttle missions and once on the Soyuz to the ISS, where I commanded Expedition 14. The day you get the phone call, Warren Assis says, you know, we'd like you to come be an astronaut. I mean, that's really life-changing, no exaggeration. MLA says there are aspects of spaceflight that no amount of training can truly prepare you for.

14:54The first is the launch itself. The shuttle simulator is pretty good. I mean, it moved in six axes and it vibrated and it made noise and all that, but it's nothing like the real thing. You just can't imagine how it feels to be accelerating like that for almost nine minutes straight. I mean, it's wild. The second thing is the sensation of floating, which we had already experienced in a zero-g parabolic flight, but you only get 20 or 25 seconds at a time. These parabolic flights involve getting in a plane that climbs steeply, tops out, and falls, simulating weightlessness. In the trade, that plane is known as the vomit comet.

15:33And then there's the third thing. Probably the biggest impact is seeing the Earth for the first time. And it's really surprising because if you think about it, it's probably the thing that we have the opportunity to be trained most on because we look at a lot of photography. We spend a lot of time preparing to take pictures of the Earth. We hear what it's like from the crewmates that have already flown, etc. But when you see it for the first time, it's surreal. I mean, you see this beautiful, fragile planet. And then when you look the other direction, it's this sort of black void that looks very uninviting.

16:10And it makes you appreciate what we have. you want to protect that place because it's such contrast with everything else that you see. Looking down on the Earth from the International Space Station is one thing. Now imagine being millions of miles away on a distant planet with the potential that you might never be able to come home again. Certainly the most difficult part is the emotional, psychological part, the separation from your family and friends. It's reassuring to look out the window and see the Earth. It's lovely that you can pick up a phone effectively and call any human on the Earth, and hopefully they'll answer.

16:50That is not going to be the case when we go to Mars. The closeness that you feel because we're only at 400 kilometers or so will disappear. And I think that's going to be a big void. And I'm not sure how we're going to prepare for that because it's really, really difficult to think about. You know, you're going to look back at Earth and not know which one of those white dots is Earth even, let alone see any recognizable features. Nor will you be able to call anybody because of the time delay, because of the distance. So would MLA, who spent almost 300 days in space, go to Mars? No. I wouldn't go to Mars, at least today, because with our current propulsion technology, it would just take too much time.

17:37I will say that going to space is an immense privilege, but it is only that in the context of coming back to Earth and life on Earth. I am not one of those people that say, I want to go to space and never come back. I absolutely want to come back, and I want to revel in having had that experience, but I don't want to have it for the rest of my life. We can only guess what it would be like to live on Mars. After all, anything we've learned is based on simulations here on Earth, or astronauts who've gone to the moon, or lived for weeks or months aboard the International Space Station. Those experiences suggest Mars will be physically demanding and emotionally difficult.

18:22But that's only half the challenge. Mars is a different world. Not only is it millions of miles away from the comforts of Earth, It's a hostile environment. The moment we land on Mars, it will be trying to kill us.

18:53This is the Sound of Mars, recorded by the NASA rover Perseverance. What you're hearing is Martian wind whipping over the planet's surface. The sound has been pitched up by two octaves to make it easier to hear. Research projects might be looking at how humans could cope with months, even years in cramped and isolated conditions. What they can't mimic are the incredibly hostile conditions of Mars itself. So Mars is a really harsh environment. For example, the surface is covered in this fine dirt called regolith, and it's very tiny and very sharp. And if you breathe it in, it could scar your lungs.

19:37You'll remember Kelly Wienersmith, co-author of the 2023 book, A City on Mars. It also has poisons in it, perchlorates, and they mess with the hormones made by your thyroid. And your thyroid controls things like your heart rate and blood pressure. and we know if you grow plants in it, then the plants suck that up and then you would be eating those chemicals. And the atmosphere is just as unforgiving. Mars doesn't have great protection from radiation like we have here on Earth. So space radiation hits the surface. Because of that, you're probably going to have to live underground and let the dirt protect you from that radiation.

20:15Additionally, Mars has 1 % of the atmosphere that we have here on Earth, and it's mostly carbon dioxide. And that thin atmosphere isn't enough to support your breathing in any way. So you will never be able to go outside and like feel a breeze on your face and take a deep breath. You're always going to need to wear a spacesuit. And when you're doing that, you're going to be exposed to radiation again. And even if you wear a spacesuit all the time. Mars has 40 % of the gravity that we experience here on Earth. And so that means our bones might be deteriorating. Our muscles might be deteriorating.

20:49In places with lower gravity, like the Red Planet, our muscles won't work as hard and our bones will lose density. So Mars dwellers will have to exercise a lot just to keep their bodies from weakening. From a health perspective, then, Mars is a nightmarish cocktail of radiation and poisons that would make living there for extended periods of time extremely difficult, even for small groups of healthy astronauts surviving in tiny living pods. But that hasn't deterred the most fervent proponents of Mars exploration, the ones with dreams of interplanetary civilization. Elon Musk wants the human race to settle on Mars and has talked several times not only of a city on Mars but of a self-sustaining city.

21:40A self-sustaining city is one where people reproduce. Robert Zubrin, founder of the Mars Society, who we heard from in Episode 1, has written about the importance of eventually having children on Mars. In his 2024 book, The New World on Mars, Zubrin notes that if a Martian population were highly fertile, it could grow significantly faster. Now, what do Musk, Zubrin, and most other advocates for space settlement have in common? I have to note that when I go to space settlement conferences, there's never a line for the ladies room. Bingo. One of the biggest complaints I get, mostly from men, is that I'm being way too negative about the prospects for being able to have babies in space.

22:28You know, I point out to this community that here on Earth, when people give birth in areas where there's not a lot of medical support, a lot of women die. You know, hemorrhaging happens. They end up with disabilities that are with them for the rest of their lives or their offspring have issues like we need medical support. Reproduction is dangerous in the environment that we evolved in. What are we going to do if women are hemorrhaging on Mars? I'm not seeing plans for how we're going to make shelf stable oxytocin, for example, so we can give these women as a treatment when they're hemorrhaging.

22:59Wienersmith says not only are there obvious dangers to giving birth far from home, we don't know the impact this alien environment will have on the development of fetuses in the womb. We don't know if this combination of those chemicals that I was talking about in the dirt, low gravity, increased radiation, we don't know if women are going to be able to survive or if our fetuses are going to be able to survive. And we could get these answers. We could have, for example, research stations on the moon where we have multiple rodent colonies go through many generations. And then maybe you have a woman get pregnant on the moon and you monitor her like crazy.

23:35And if anything isn't going well, you can send her back to Earth and get her the care she needs. But trying this experiment out on Mars, and Musk wants to have a million people on Mars in the next 20 to 30 years, that is way sooner than we can get the data we need. And it could just be like mass deaths out there, which sounds completely unethical to me. Life on Mars, as it stands, sounds like a constant battle against the elements, the atmosphere, the soil, the planet itself. But where there's a will, some believe there's a way. Mars is less habitable than the surface of Antarctica for humans.

24:12But the other side of the coin is that Mars' soil contains, you know, all the elements needed for life. Edwin Kite is an associate professor of planetary science at the University of Chicago. and a member of the team of scientists analyzing data from the Mars rover, Curiosity. There's plenty of nitrogen in the atmosphere, plenty of phosphorus in the soil. Mars is close enough to the sun that it receives about as much sunlight on its land surface as Earth's continents do. Mars also has a carbon dioxide atmosphere that can provide the feedstock for carbon-based life. Mars has enough water ice in its ice caps to flood the planet to an average depth of 30 meters if the temperature rises.

24:57This environment has encouraged scientists in their search for evidence that there may once have been life on Mars and that it could exist again. They argue that if we could somehow artificially change the planet's climate, we could create the conditions for life to flourish. There are basically two stages. The first stage, which is relatively easy, although still very difficult by the standards of almost everything that humans have done, is to warm up the plants to allow liquid water and a photosynthetic biosphere. In essence, we would need to warm Mars and melt the ice caps to create liquid water and allow plants to grow.

25:35Ironically, the greenhouse effect making Earth less livable could be used to make Mars more so. The second and harder stage is to raise the oxygen level through photosynthesis. If that's possible, the result would be a planet with plant life, water, and a breathable atmosphere. Perhaps then human life too could prosper on Mars. This idea of changing the planet's entire ecosystem, what's known as terraforming, has long been a feature of science fiction. It's also an area where fact and fiction might meet. But there's a problem. It will take at least centuries to get to human breathable levels. And we're not even sure if it's possible.

26:20But if we're going to move out into the solar system and eventually the galaxy, both you know as a biosphere and as a species, then we're going to have to adapt to environments like this and to some extent adapt those environments to us. We may go to Mars in the future. Perhaps technologies like terraforming will allow us to populate the planet and thrive. But even if it's possible, we are talking about hundreds of years away. With our current technology, it seems the experience of living on Mars would be arduous and unpleasant, more about surviving than flourishing. It's a far cry from the utopian imaginings conjured by some science fiction writers.

27:03We started this episode with Kim Stanley Robinson. In his Mars trilogy, he describes a world where humans create a new civilization on the planet. But he wrote those books 30 years ago. And now, he's not so sure if that idea stands up. It's completely a fantasy. It's bad science fiction. Bad science fiction shades over into fantasy, but that's fine when it's a work of fantasy literature. when it's a proposal to civilization and it includes deep fantasy elements. In other words, things that cannot happen, that are magic, magical thinking. That too is a fantasy. If you had a city on Mars and then something happened that killed every human on Earth, that community on Mars is doomed.

27:50Doomed to a slow death. They need Earth. They need everything that Earth provides. They would be an outpost only. utterly dependent. Six, five, four, three, two, one.

28:09Go, buddy! We have lived back. We have lived back. Oh, my God! Over the course of this series, we've heard about different reasons for going to Mars. Think of this like being a multi-planet species as like taking out insurance for life itself. We've heard about Elon Musk's vision of Mars as a first stop for humanity as an interplanetary species.

28:42We've also heard about the space superpowers looking to plant their flags on the surface of the red planet. We will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars. And we've heard about Mars as a new world worth exploring simply because we can. I think there is a fundamental human condition of just wanting to go somewhere perceived as an untouched land. Mars is a blank canvas. It will be what we make of it. But at least for now, it's not our home. The highest and best use of Mars might be in what it tells us about our own planet.

29:32It's an old NASA slogan. Space science isn't Earth science. And that is true. I still believe in going to Mars. If you're up there to study how planets interact with the sun, with the emptiness of space, what might help to keep Earth's atmosphere healthy, then these are valid projects. The whole point is taking care of Earth. The science we do on Mars may help us better preserve life on Earth. And we wouldn't need to move to Mars en masse to do it. On Earth, we can breathe the air. We can walk outside. And, for now at least, we can live our lives without worrying that the environment is killing us.

30:18So while we're thinking about the possibilities for Mars, we should keep in mind what it might teach us about preserving the planet we live on, planet Earth.

30:35You've been listening to Tectonic, presented by me, Peggy Hollinger. This episode was produced by Misha Frankel Duval, The senior producer is Edwin Lane. The executive producer is Flo Phillips. Special thanks to Clive Cookson. Fact-checking by Lucy Baldwin. Sound design by Breen Turner and Samantha Jovinko. Manuela Saragossa is the FT's acting co-head of audio.

31:14Thank you.