Science: Humans to Mars? Why Not?

Its tallest volcano is three times as high as Mount Everest, and its great rift valley plunges to over four times the depth of the Grand Canyon. Global dust storms with winds up to 300 m.p.h. sometimes obscure its arid surface, which is pocked with vast gulches and deltas apparently left by ancient rivers. And maybe, just maybe, its stones bear fossils of primitive creatures that vanished billions of years ago with the waters that gave them life.

Despite the vivid images relayed by the Viking landers in the mid-1970s, Mars to most people remains a planet of the imagination, as unlikely a home for humans as it is for diminutive green men. To a surprising number of prominent scientists and politicians, however, it is the next frontier, a new world to be tamed and colonized. Gathering in Washington last week for a celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Apollo-Soyuz space linkup were such luminaries as Astronomer Carl Sagan, former Moonwalker and U.S. Senator Harrison Schmitt, Astronaut Sally Ride, Hawaii Senator Spark Matsunaga and NASA Chief James Beggs. They proposed an agenda for the future as well: a joint U.S.-Soviet manned mission to Mars, which could be launched as early as 2010. In the highlight of the meeting, sponsored by the Planetary Society and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Cosmonauts Alexei Leonov and Valery Kubasov, the Soviet linkup veterans, rejoined their Apollo counterparts Tom Stafford, Deke Slayton and Vance Brand to exchange a few emotional bear hugs and put in their own plug for Mars. "If the decision were taken," Leonov said, smiling roguishly, "I wouldn't object to doing it again, with the same men participating."

The hope shared by the spacemen is that by working together toward a common goal, the two nations might somehow put aside their differences. "It's hard to imagine a more dramatic and fitting symbol on behalf of the human species," said Sagan. "We should embrace not the god of war, but the planet named after him."

There are more practical reasons for a joint mission. Neither nation alone can easily afford the estimated $40 billion price tag. And even that figure is conservative; it assumes the existence of the $10 billion orbiting U.S. space station, now scheduled for completion around 1992, which will be used as a platform to assemble and launch the Mars-bound rocket.

Technical cooperation might also ease the engineering difficulties inherent in a lengthy and complex manned voyage. At its closest point, Mars is 35 million miles from earth, or 160 times the distance of the moon. A hypothetical round trip, including a Mars layover, would take two to three years and require a craft that with the requisite fuel, oxygen, solid food and other "consumables" might weigh 500 tons. From ten to 20 shuttle trips would be needed just to ferry to the space station the pieces that would eventually be assembled into a Mars ship.