After writing the other day about Dennis Tito’s audacious proposal to send a man and a woman on a Martian fly-by in the year 2018, I’ve become somewhat obsessed with the idea. I think it’s the crystal-clear deadline that really sparks my enthusiasm. Lots of people and organizations talk about sending humans to Mars… someday. Twenty or thirty years from now. It seems like it’s always 20 years out, no matter how much time passes. But much like JFK’s famous Moon speech called for a definite timeframe to make the dream happen, Tito — and more importantly that immutable launch window for the fastest free-return trajectory — has drawn a distinct line in the sand: we go now, or not at all. And the fact that the line is only five years away cranks up the excitement levels. I’d love not to be in a nursing home when human eyes get that near to another planet for the first time.

I’ll tell you how enthused I am about this “Mission for America,” as Tito refers to it: I actually downloaded and read the feasibility study put together by the Inspiration Mars Foundation. For fun. Now, my field of expertise is obviously not anything that remotely resembles engineering, but I am a pretty big space nerd with a good feel for how a lot of this hardware works, and the study was obviously written with the non-rocket scientist in mind, so while certain tables and mathematical chatter flew right over my head, I understood the overall gist of it. And while the study’s authors concede that this was only a preliminary examination, and there are a lot of factors that need to be looked at much more rigorously before such a mission can proceed, the findings are convincing. We could do this. It’d push our current technology right up to the limit, and there’s no question it would be tremendously risky. (For instance, one thing the feasibility study brings up that I’ve never really thought about is is the matter of re-entry. They’re not all the same, you see, and the  planned trajectory for this Mars flight would bring the ship back into Earth’s atmosphere at far greater speeds than any other manned spacecraft has ever reached during re-entry, so the astronauts would experience very high g-loads — after a year-and-a-half of weightlessness, remember — and the heatshield would need to be very beefy. But this isn’t an insurmountable problem, just one that needs very careful planning.) Nevertheless, the study’s authors conclude that the mission is possible, and possible within the timeframe we have available. Using existing, state-of-the-art technology — nothing exotic that has to be designed and built from scratch, but things that are available now, or will be very shortly — we really could send a couple spinning around the backside of fracking Mars and bring them home again.

I’m going to go on the record right now and declare that I think we should do it. Or at least attempt it. And not just because I’m an aging child of the 1970s who grew up on Star Trek and Space: 1999 and legends of  the Apollo program and all the other space-related stuff of that era, and who still yearns to see some part of all that come to fruition (although there is, of course, more than a little truth in that accusation). I think we should try it because I believe this country needs something like this, some crazy, exciting dream that’s bigger than partisan politics, bigger than sports or entertainment media, something that will bring us together and give us all a shot of national pride and something to think about other than how shitty everything has become. It’s been decades since we had that sort of shared cultural experience. And things are so very bad right now. The only other time this country has been so at odds with itself, so divided into tribes that are so completely wary of every thing the other side thinks, says, and does, was on the eve of the Civil War. But a big symbolic “first” — especially one that’s not paid for by taxes the people of this nation no longer want to pay — carried out under the American flag might be just the thing to bring us all together again, at least for a little while.

Of course, the naysayers are already coming out of the woodwork, shouting that Tito is out of his mind, that it’s a scam, that he’ll never get the funding (have I mentioned that this is intended to be an entirely private venture?), or there’s not enough time to put it together, or — most  disheartening of all — that it’s a suicide mission. They’re saying that whatever lucky couple wins the seats aboard the Mars ship will never make back alive. And let’s be honest with ourselves, maybe they won’t. Five hundred days in a tin can going so far out into the void… that’s pretty dangerous. A lot of things could go wrong. But I wonder how many people in Portugal said it was suicide when Columbus announced he was going to sail west toward the very edge of the Earth? Or when some hunter-gatherer on the plains of Africa announced that he — or she, perhaps! — wanted to see what was on the other side of that ridge over there. Look, I’m an old-school Trekkie. I believe, in the immortal words of Captain Kirk, that risk is our business. That it’s worth taking a chance in the name of accomplishing a historic first and pushing back the boundaries of human experience and knowledge just a little bit more.

I have always considered myself an explorer at heart. I believe that that’s the basic nature of the human species, to want to know what’s over the horizon. But we get distracted, especially these days, when there are so many shiny things around us, and so many seemingly insurmountable problems weighing us down. We get caught up in the mundane worries of making of a living and keeping ourselves going on days when it seems like everything in the world wants to grind us into powder. And when that happens, we need an adventure — even if it’s only a vicarious one! — to break us out of our complacent ruts and help us rediscover what we really are. The human species needs to explore… to learn… to just see what’s out there. Robotic proxies can only fill so much of that need. At some point, we’ve got to see it with our own eyes.

I really hope this happens. If Tito asks for public donations, I’ll contribute. And I’ll keep watching for news from the foundation… and I’ll keep my fingers crossed that somehow, against all probability, this actually happens.

(Incidentally, if this venture intrigues you, I recommend this article on how it all came about…)

If you haven’t heard, the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft arrived safely at the International Space Station early Sunday morning (8:56 AM Eastern time), marking its third successful flight (and second official cargo run) to the orbiting outpost. The trip was a bit bumpy this time out… following a flawless launch, the Dragon appeared for a time to be in serious trouble. The solar panels that supply electrical power for the vehicle refused to deploy, a problem that was traced back to another problem with pressurizing the craft’s thruster propellant tanks. (Briefly, Dragon needs to make a couple maneuvers before it opens its solar “wings”; no thrusters, no maneuvers, so the onboard computer refused to deploy the solar array.) Engineers at SpaceX figured out and corrected the problem within a few hours, putting the spacecraft behind schedule, but otherwise no harm was done. And really this mishap was a good thing, from a certain point of view: SpaceX has now proven that its people and its ship can confront major malfunctions and still get the job done. This wasn’t an Apollo 13-level disaster, but it was serious enough, and could have jeopardized the mission if the ground crews hadn’t figured it out. So good job, SpaceX!

If you’re interested in reading all the details of the launch and subsequent troubleshooting, Phil Plait (the Bad Astronomy guy) has a detailed play-by-play here. Dragon will remain at the ISS for three weeks, dropping off 2,300 pounds of cargo and bringing home some 3,000 pounds of test results and used equipment.

If that’s not exciting enough for you, here are a couple of other spaceflight tidbits that have caught my eye recently:

• I’m sure everyone remembers the announcement last year that a company called Planetary Resources wants to mine near-Earth asteroids for fun and profit, a scheme that has been widely scorned by skeptics who don’t think it can be done, or don’t think it would be worth the cost. Well, skeptics be damned, there’s now another company throwing its hat into the asteroid-mining ring, a start-up called Deep Space Industries. Granted, neither company has revealed any truly detailed plans (let alone any kind of hardware that’s ready to fly), but the mere fact that people are talking seriously about attempting something that I grew up reading about in sci-fi novels, and that there are now two companies competing to try it… well, I’m excited about the possibilities. Asteroid mining really does seem feasible to me, if not right away, then within a few years, and it’s an offworld activity that has — or could have, anyhow — some genuine practical value beyond high-minded ideas about exploration for its own sake. Hell, that meteorite over Russia a couple weeks ago ought to be proof enough that there are big rocks in the sky all around us, we may as well try to put them to use. God knows we’re rapidly using up everything down here.
• Finally, did you hear that Dennis Tito, the gazillionaire who paid his own way into the history books as the first space tourist back in 2001, has set up a foundation with the aim of sending a man and a woman on a close-approach fly-by of the planet Mars in 2018? That’s when a planetary alignment between Earth and Mars that occurs only twice every 15 years will (theoretically) enable a relatively brief round-trip journey of 501 days. The idea is to send a middle-aged married couple who are beyond child-bearing age — probably, I would guess, because the radiation they’ll be exposed to will make them infertile — on a low-fuel “free return” course that will take them within 100 miles of the Martian surface before slingshoting them back home. A free-return orbit will ensure that their spacecraft makes it back regardless of any malfunction… including a worst-case scenario where the crew doesn’t survive. (Go rewatch Apollo 13 — getting into a free-return was the point of them doing that dramatic thruster burn behind the back side of the Moon.) Can an expedition of this magnitude really happen in only five years? Damned if I know… it certainly seems like a long shot. But a lot of the necessary hardware is already in development, which ought to help. SpaceX is working up a heavy-lift version of its Falcon-9 booster — the same one that has successfully shot Dragon into space four times now, as well as commercial payloads — that is supposed to be capable of sending a craft into deep space, and that should be ready in time. As for a spacecraft, there are several capsule-style vehicles under construction now, including a human-rated version of Dragon, but they’re all pretty damn cozy for such a long trip. I’ve seen an artist’s conception of a Mars craft with a Bigelow inflatable module attached for some expanded living space, but even an arrangement like that will no doubt become pretty claustrophobic after a year and a half. Whatever lucky couple wins the lottery will have their marriage put to the ultimate test, I think. And I have no idea if our current life-support technology is up to the job. What about food supplies for that long a flight? And again, there’s the radiation to contend with, once our intrepid Marsnauts leave Earth’s protective magnetic field. (The Apollo astronauts faced that problem too, but they were only exposed for a few days, not 18 months.) The launch window apparently coincides with a period of low solar activity, and I’ve read that older people would have less risk of developing cancer than younger astronauts (because they don’t have as many years left for it to develop), but still…  a mere five years really doesn’t seem like enough time to prepare for something like this, does it? Nevertheless, I tend to agree with Tito’s thinking that a big, bold proposal to do something no human has ever done before is something worth investigating. If it succeeds — a big if, I grant — but if, imagine what this could do for the pride of a nation that’s been battered pretty badly in the last couple of decades. And just imagine being one of those two people, seeing a whole new planet in person. The first people in all of history to do so. It would be… awesome. In the original, pre-1980s-slang sense of that word. Like the old ad campaign once promised, the human adventure is just beginning…

I’m always saying that this isn’t the future I was promised as a kid, but maybe that future is still on the way. Maybe it just got pushed out a bit, and I’ll still live long enough to see at least some of it come true, even if I won’t be among those making it happen…