To what extent are we responsible for the credibility gap? We should know better than anyone that there are real challenges that can’t be wished away, that Mars is hard, and that “all you gotta do” doesn’t really cut it when human lives are on the line. Yes, humans will die in space, and on the ground building space machines, but I’m sure we can all agree that we want to minimize people dying for stupid reasons. And so, as a couple of illustrative examples, I’m going to look at the titans of the movement and nitpick for a bit. First, Elon Musk’s suggestion that space radiation can be solved with a column of water between the astronaut and the sun. This only works if the column is of a comparable size to the gyroradius of protons in the solar magnetic field, which is a few thousand km. So, the pros sometimes make mistakes, as we saw with SpaceX’s last attempted launch. And then the original slides for Mars Direct, I saw as a kid when the Mars Direct book tour came to Australia, which suggested a first launch in 1997. We earn no credibility by pushing optimistic or aggressive timelines. Or, for example, our own Robert Zubrin’s oped in 2012 in the Washington Post, suggesting 3 Falcon Heavies to fly 2 humans to Mars, a mission plan that no expert I know hasn’t found a problem with. The Dragons are too heavy to land on Mars, and too crowded for people to live in, once all the provisions are also added, like Gemini but for 150 weeks instead of 2. It doesn’t pass the sniff test – it smells of desperation.
