Why go to the moon? Simple. To Gather Resources We Need

Over the last couple of weeks, I've explained how Mars first reached mythical status in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a desirable planet for people to visit and even live by a series of books and lectures by a somewhat crazy billionaire turned astronomer named Percival Lowell. https://homerhickamblog.blogspot.com/2019/06/a-myth-known-as-mars-psst-nasas-not.html

Percival Lowell, billionaire, astronomer, and kinda crazy

After that, I examined what it would actually take to send humans to Mars and my belief that NASA will never attempt it nor will anyone else who's reasonable because this tiny little planet isn't worth the blood, time, or treasure to send humans there when robotic and artificial intelligence is available to thoroughly explore it and get back all the answers it might hold. https://homerhickamblog.blogspot.com/2019/07/mars-is-not-for-humans-not-now-and.html

Earth

Mars

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Buffy

But this isn't true for Luna, our moon. It's different. People not only can go there, they should go because we need their intelligence, their labor, and their sweat to gather important resources for the world.

My opinion is undoubtedly colored by the unique place I'm from, a town called Coalwood in a state called West Virginia in a place called Appalachia where it's difficult to get there, difficult to live there, but has resources that must be shipped elsewhere in order to keep our civilization humming along.

That's me, third from the right kneeling. Just us 9th grade boys
after visiting the mine where our dads worked. They made money in a dangerous profession but
raised their families, educated their kids, and sent us off to the unsuspecting
world where we did pretty darn well. Our dads were just like what miners on the moon will be like, good, robust, hearty, and daggone smart.

In other words, I'm from a place something like the moon.

West Virginians came to the mountain state in the early 20th Century attracted by the coal mining industry. It wasn't that they necessarily liked mining coal. They came so as to make money and have a place where they could raise their families. The work they did was nasty and dangerous but they still did it and did it as long as they could. After awhile, it became their way of life and they fell in love with the mountains, hills, and valleys of the rugged land.

One of my memoirs about life in Coalwood.
It was a New York Times
best-seller.

Their way of life is the way I think life on the moon could and should evolve.

A few years back, I wrote about the descendants of West Virginians in Crescent, the second novel in my "Crater" trilogy.  In the 22nd Century, Crater, a young Helium-3 miner, and Crescent, a genetically modified female, meet a group on the moon who are fleeing from Earth because their land has been stolen. It turns out they are from an area in the former United States known as Appalachia which has been forcibly depopulated for socio-economic reasons. This is not too farfetched as much of the West Virginia county and the town of Coalwood where I grew up has been depopulated, the people forced to go elsewhere to find jobs. I am one of those ex-pats so I can relate to the group that Crater and Crescent agree to lead to a far place on the moon, a mining town called Endless Dust which is laid out somewhat like Coalwood.

Recently, I told Senator Ted Cruz and his Aviation and Space Subcommittee that what I want out of the space program is "Coalwood on the moon" and that I don't care two cents about who the next professional astronaut is who goes there. What I care about is opening a place where real people - plumbers, electricians, miners, construction workers, and other so-called blue collar workers - can go work, make money, and raise their families just like in the Coalwood where I grew up. Go here to see exactly what I said:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRbCkFYZpWk&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR1v9ls4FT3cJGXFBGYJu4XJ2IBbCa-ei1DAHFV-aN_a7fnT9uStwxCK6bg

The moon I describe in Crater, Crescent, and The Lunar Rescue Company is a place where there are many Coalwoods, frontier mining towns populated by a rugged people made even tougher and stronger by the land in which they live.

My "Crater" series of novels (aka Helium-3 series).

So how does that happen? How does the moon go from being an exotic fantastic locale where only brave astronauts dare to go to a place of work for folks like those who raised their families in Coalwood? And why would the taxpayers of the United States and our partners and allies ever want to shell out even a dime to make that happen?


It is because the moon qualifies as a reasonable place for the world to expand and gather resources.

Hi there. I'm Luna, your neighbor. I've got lots of good stuff for you
if you'll come and get it.

And what are those resources on the moon that the people of lunar Coalwoods will gather for us and send back? I'll give you the usual list: Platinum, Helium, Helium-3, Thorium, etc. etc. and so forth but remember beneath every crater is the shattered remains of an asteroid. There's likely gold in them thar lunar hills and a lot else, too.

Here's another best-seller I wrote. Vice President Pence
said it was one of his favorite books. It's a little outdated but
still has some great stuff in it about why we need to go back.
And it's got adventure. And thrills. And great characters.
 And sex in space, too (not that it has anything to do with anything else).

As to the "how," it's also pretty simple. We as a nation have done the flags and footprints on the moon thing with Apollo Now, 50 years later, we need an anchoring base on the moon from which other entities, whether governmental or private, can come to, outfit themselves and then set across the lunar plains, valleys, rilles, and hills to explore and then build their roads and towns and start working and making money and raising their families and sending resources back to a needy Earth.

That's it. That's all our federal government has to do. Just build an anchor up there, one staging area and then hold onto it long enough for all others to follow and build up a lunar civilization based on gathering resources.

My clever little moon anchor as described in my 1993 (!) study for NASA

I kind of mapped that anchor out in my 1993 study which I cleverly disguised as a comparison with the South Pole Station that can be seen here: https://homerhickamblog.blogspot.com/2019/03/1993-study-of-moon-laboratory-by-homer.html

Will Americans come around to my vision?

We shall see.

 - - Homer Hickam

Mars is not for humans, not now and perhaps not ever and here's why...

And so it continues by some folks at NASA Headquarters that we are going to the moon with the Artemis program so that the agency can then put people on Mars. Folks, I'm sorry but they're just not and here is why:

Sooooo sorry!

In a previous blog, https://homerhickamblog.blogspot.com/2019/06/a-myth-known-as-mars-psst-nasas-not.html, I explained how Mars rose into the consciousness of so many people over the past century or so as a desirable place to send humans to land and live. But Mars has always been more of a myth than reality.

To understand the reality of what Mars really is, think of it as a corpse or a mummy. It is interesting as a former living thing and deserving of study but also somewhat repulsive.

This is Earth...

And this is Mars.

So, just for a moment - and I'm really sorry to have to let reality intrude because Mars is a great fantasy - let's look at what Mars really is:

• It is a tiny planet, only one third the size of Earth and only twice the size of the moon. In many ways, it's just a large dwarf planet.

• Its atmosphere is deadly poison, a very thin mix of mostly carbon dioxide. The atmospheric pressure at the top of Mount Everest in what is called the "death zone" is 5 pounds per square inch. On Mars, the maximum atmospheric pressure is .088 pounds per square inch. Even if Mars had an atmosphere of pure oxygen, it would mean a quick death for anyone who tried to breathe it.

• Mars is a dead planet. It has no magnetic field like Earth. Our magnetic field captures radiation like a shield and keeps us relatively safe from the harmful effects of all those whizzing particles.

Golleee! I thought Mars was bigger than that!

• Mars is very cold. On average, it's about 81 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. This is much colder than anywhere on Earth. Ever seen the black, ugly frostbitten toes of the climbers on Mount Everest? Let a boot warmer not work for just a few minutes on Mars and you'd have horribly frozen toes. Same goes for other parts of the body including hands. On Mars, frostbite would be a constant worry not to mention failure of the moving parts of your suit.

You wore those boots on Mars? I told you their heaters weren't working.
Now you're going to lose all your toes!

• The surface of Mars is awash with radiation that is deadly to humans. The only instrument sent to Mars to measure radiation was nearly destroyed by solar flares that would have killed within hours any Earthian mammal. Think living in Chernobyl. Not in the city. In the nuclear plant.

• Mars is very far away from the Earth in both distance and time. On average, it's about 140 million miles away. Earth and Mars do a complicated dance around the sun. Most of our robots sent there take about 10 months one way and we could expect most human missions to be the same. However, it's only every couple of years that Mars and the Earth line up so that the journey isn't longer.

• Plants can't grow in Martian soil without intensive leaching of the perchlorates out of it and the addition of vast amounts of fertilizers. In other words, Mars dirt is poisonous to Earthian plants. You can't live off the land without a huge dedicated farming effort requiring trillions of gallons of water and tons of fertilizer in amounts that are simply humongous along with physical labor and the operations of machines plowing and digging and sowing and reaping unknown to humankind in the entire history of the world ever.

• Mars dust is poison if breathed. That's right, kids. Mars dust is everywhere, floating, drifting, getting into nooks and crannies. And if breathed? Those perchlorates I mentioned above that kills plants? Well, breathe it in and it will kill you, too, and there is no way to get away from it without massive care, huge filters, and even then, it will still probably get you. You know, like the sand from the beach you do everything to keep out of the villa? Dust to dust will mean more on Mars than even on Earth!

The surface of Mars. It's kind of desolate. Pretty, agreed, but still deadly

OK, got it? Now, with these realities of what Mars is really like, let's pretend you're the manager of the team responsible to send humans to Mars. Here (vastly simplified) are your tasks.

• First, you would have to figure out to deal with the limitations of the human body outside our protective atmosphere and magnetic field. Just some of the things that would have to be overcome are these realities:

     1. Prolonged weightlessness is not good for humans. As a minimum, living for months in microgravity causes loss of muscles, loss of bone calcium, possibly slows brain function, and causes eye damage. In other words, it makes you weak, your bones brittle, your thinking somewhat muddled, and fuzzy vision. Can you think of any human groups presently like this? Of course. Weightlessness makes you old before your time. Unless that's solved, sailing astronauts through space to Mars and landing them would be like placing 80-year old folks atop Mount Everest and expecting them to get out and go to work to stay alive.

     2. Prolonged exposure to the radiation in space outside our magnetic field is not good for humans. Background radiation that is everywhere in open space is bad enough but undeterred cosmic rays will zap through the human body like little bullets destroying flesh, blood, and anything else that gets in its way. In ten months of exposure, unprotected humans might look normal but inside they'd be like Swiss cheese with lots of health problems on the march that would kill them.

    3. Prolonged time away from assistance from other humans is not good for humans. There is a lot that can go wrong with the human body. The appendix is a good example. It can be fine one day, completely haywire the next and will kill you if you don't get it immediately surgically removed. Wintering over on the South Pole is about the closest we've ever come to separating a group of humans from everyone else in modern times. When a woman (who was a physician) was diagnosed with breast cancer there, she had to operate on herself and an emergency evacuation took place which would be impossible for anyone on a flight to Mars (or on the surface of Mars, of course). Although she survived the ordeal, the poor woman would die a few years later because the cancer had been left untreated for too long.

Sick person on way to Mars

• Next, recognizing these human limitation problems, you would have to build the hardware, software, train your crews, and organize the Earthian support teams for the voyage. Let's see as a minimum (and again vastly simplified) what that would take:

     1. You'd quickly realize that nothing NASA or anyone else has on the drawing boards would be adequate as a living space for humans on a 10-month journey through space. The Orion capsule that NASA keeps touting as its "beyond the moon spacecraft" would be laughable to your engineers. Orion is a death trap for any voyage longer than a couple of weeks. It couldn't begin to carry the water, air, and supplies necessary to survive the ordeal of flying for months through irradiated space.

You're going to travel 140 million miles and ten months through space in that?
"Farewell and adieu to ye fair Spanish ladies..."

    2.   Something big then would have to be designed to overcome the limitations of the human body, and then tested, and then flown numerous times with test crews outside the magnetic field of Earth in order to assure that the flight is survivable. Nothing like this has ever been done. It will take an enormous effort to build this spacecraft that might provide artificial gravity (spin it?), radiation shielding (Lead? Water? Unobtainium?). You'll also need inside this ship a full medical lab, a complete pharmacy, a surgical ward, and an optics specialist that can treat eyes and make spectacles as needed.

Hi there! You're sick, too? And we're only a million miles into this flight?
Thank goodness, NASA paid my way through medical school and I only have to do this once!

    3. If your engineers come back to you (as they probably will) and say that ten months is just too long to fly through space, you'll have to build advanced propulsion systems such as nuclear thermal rocket engines. These do not presently exist so they will have to be built and tested and actually flown through space, preferably all the way to Mars. These might cut down the journey to a few months but, sadly, even for that smaller amount of time, you'll find you still have to provide all that medical assistance and shielding. It'll just cut down on your odds of having a disabled (or dead) crew upon arrival at Mars.

    4. Somewhere along the line, one of your engineers is going to ask "How much food is the crew going to need? And water?" The answer is enormous amounts and both quite heavy. So now, you've got to design a galley and stuff your ship full of food and water. It is mindful of what the German U-boats had to do to cross the Atlantic during World War II. Every available space, even the toilet, was stuffed full of food and they still starved and some came down with scurvy. Let's say you only have a three-person crew. For a journey requiring ten months, they would need (according to the U.S. Army's field guide for soldiers in the field) about five tons of food and 25 tons of potable and 25 tons of non-potable water.  Of course, you can recycle some of the water but not all so you'll need to make sure you've got that mechanism all figured out without any possibility of failure. Otherwise, you're risking your crew dying of thirst or, at best, really stinky since they won't be able to wash. Best thing, you'll realize, is carry lots of water. You've got to get back, too, so you kind of end up doubling everything. Better triple it just to be sure. Uh oh. Better get a bigger ship! And rocket!

Eat your limes, m'boys ere ye gets the scurvy!!!
But we be astronauts, ain't we Cap'n?
Yeah, but ye ain't immortal.

    5. How about poop? Well, you'd better put in a number of toilets and they'd better work. Poop can be slung outside and probably will be but if there's a problem and pipes get clogged, better come up with something better than they've got on the ISS which has a nasty toilet according to everyone who's had to use it. Think what it would mean to have to use a rural gas station toilet for ten months! And then another ten months!

Yuk!

    6. Uh oh! How is the crew going to get power? Solar panels? They're going to have to be huge! We're going away from the sun! Nuclear power plant? Where? How? It's got to be shielded and somebody's going have to know how to operate it. I've got it! Let's use fuel cells. Oh, wait, one of those almost killed the crew of Apollo 13. What to do, what to do? Nobody knows. Talk about engineering arguments! You'll finally just have to choose something but you realize there are going to be serious drawback to any power solution. You realize on a lot of choices you're making in the design of this big ship, you're crossing your fingers. You can't wait for vacation. You take a cruise and one of the passengers, a young person, dies of something along the way. You're stressed! That could have been one of your Mars crew! You start thinking of early retirement.

People die on cruise ships. All ages. It's sad but true.
But if you could put a ship this size in space
and send it to Mars, you might be on to something...

    7. So let's say you've got your ship designed and a-building. It's a big, complex thing but you think it'll get a crew to Mars without killing them but now you realize that the crew is going to have to be trained on living in this contraption and ground crews are going to have to be trained to keep track of what's happening in it and also every facet of its systems. Checking back on your spaceflight history, you realize that the Apollo missions had tens of thousands of people on Earth who knew precisely their particular part of the Apollo capsule and lander and a thousand or so people who were fully occupied every moment of their lives with the flights that lasted a little over a week. But for Mars, you're going to have to have all these people dedicated to keeping track of every component of your spacecraft for months and years. It will be a vast, marching army that will stretch out to the horizon and somehow you're going to have to keep them trained, salaried, and happy. Nothing like it, short of war where the nation went into rationing to support its troops in the field, has ever been done. Just as D-Day was practiced and the Apollo missions were practiced, a ship to Mars is going to have to be recreated in a realistic simulator on Earth with crews spending months inside it and wave after wave of ground controllers moved in and out to their stations while simulations teams throw problem after problem at them. There will be day, evening, and night shifts and the sims will be interminable. Not every person hired will be able to take the incessant training and pressure. Constant retraining will be necessary. Finally, someone will come up with ships at sea which are monitored and maintained entirely by the crew inside. It will be tempting to get rid of ground support and just put enough crew aboard and let them go essentially on their own. But who will dare to let this happen?

Mars Mission Control (multiply this scene by about six times in size
 not to mention behind the scenes controllers) operating
24 hours a day for years at a time incessantly without relief. 
To keep things going, you're going to have to pay these guys a lot and
they're still going to burn out.

    8. OK, you've got your ship a-building, your crews and ground support a-training, and then one of your pesky engineers is going to ask, "Um, what about landing and how long are they going to stay?" This will start yet another round of engineering design with lots of unknown factors. For instance, will the crew be healthy enough to land on Mars? And, if so, how to do it? Retro rockets? Parachutes? How will they get back to the mother ship? And what are they going to do to dodge all that radiation down there? What are they going to eat? What about water? Got to put tons of everything down there first... somehow. OMG!

    9. So you've got a lander which has the ability to take off again - you hope. But you can't just have your crew wander around. You've got to have a habitat that shields them from the radiation and where they can eat, drink, poop, pee, and get surgery as required. So you realize you've got to ship not only food and water in advance but some place for them to live! This will mean putting that ship for the crew which was a-building on hold, and all those simulations and ground controllers on hold, and now having to construct a survivable habitat and somehow getting that to the exact place where the crew will land and then train the crews to live inside them and the ground folks to monitor them and then...

Humongous Mars Craft of Some Sort Kind Of Maybe

•  And THEN you're going to realize that for what it's taking to put this sad and probably sick little crew on Mars, you could've built a thousand, nay TEN THOUSAND robots capable of scouring the surface of the little planet AND by the time you've built all these contraptions and trained all these people and driven yourself and a lot of other people pretty much crazy, you could've waited until Artificial Intelligence got to the level that AI droids could even look like people and you could even kind of crawl inside these semi-people's heads and see what they see and feel what they feel.  AND they don't get sick, they don't care much about radiation, and they don't eat or drink or poop or do any of the things that people do AND everything is suddenly simplified!!!

So we would go from this scenario with humans on Mars:

Mars Mission Director: Hey, what happened to Ken?
Crew Controller: He fell off a cliff and broke his arm. Compound fracture.
MMD: OMG! How is he?
CC: In emergency surgery. His arm is also infected. Doc says he'll need massive amounts of antibiotics and they're running low. He needs a blood transfusion, too. Sir, I think Ken might not make it.
MMD: Just because of a broken arm?
CC: Afraid so.
MMD: How's his significant other?
CC: Buffy is stressed out of her mind. The doc told her to rest. She took a pill and went to bed.
MMD: Can we get them out of there?
CC: Not really.
MMD: What's to be done?
CC: We probably should send along a crematorium on the next cargo flight.
MMD: I don't get paid enough for this.
CC: None of us do, sir.

Ken broke his arm on Mars!!!

To this scenario:

Mars Mission Director: Hey, how's AI Buffy and AI Ken?
Crew Controller: AI Ken fell off a cliff yesterday and broke one of his arms. AI Buffy is replacing it with a spare.
MMD: Great. How's AI Buffy's power pack?
CC: She'll be dead in about two months but she's gone a year past her design.
MMD: Great. She going to be able to operate that well digger until then?
CC: Don't see why not. A new improved AI Buffy is on the way there to replace her, too.
MMD: Great. Carry on.

The new AI Buffy on Mars is doing swell and
the old one fixed Ken's arm!

And that, folks, is the sad and sorry truth on why people are not going to Mars any time soon and very possibly never. It's not that it's too hard. It just doesn't make any sense with the technology we've got, the limitations of the human body, our ability to keep ground control armies marching forever without some economic or national-survival sense to it,  and the present and near-future capability of robots and artificial intelligence. Besides that, Mars just isn't the planet it's made out to be. It's a hellhole, pretty much, an interesting hellhole to be sure but not the place we need to dump so much effort into. Let's save that for the Earth-like planets around other stars. We'll get there, one way or the other, because they will be, unlike Mars, worth the time, blood, and treasure.

Oh, and I'll add one thing more. All those folks who think they really, really want to go to Mars and live should just go out to Garfield County, Montana, where I hunt dinosaurs every summer, and squat down in the badlands and spend a few months without communications with anyone and just kind of live off the land or what they've carried with them. I guarantee you by the time a few weeks are done - and most likely a few days - they'll be begging to get out of there and, compared to Mars, those marvelous badlands I love so much are positively benign.

Me in the Montana badlands - benign compared to Mars.
 Wonderful country but not forever, thanks.

A Myth Known as Mars (psst, NASA's not going there, pass it on)

Dear Readers:

Many of you know that I've recently taken NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine and other top managers in the agency to task for not being able to talk about plans to go back to the moon (this time to stay) without mentioning Mars in the same breath. My unhappiness over this tendency is pretty simple: Not only do I not like being told a myth as if it were true unless it's by a Tolkien type of myth teller, I don't like young people to be the victim of myths told again and again until even the myth-tellers think they're telling the truth.

Mr. Tolkien, Myth-Teller, whose wonderful books were fiction.

So, children, here is the truth: NASA has no plans now, nor has it ever had plans, nor does it have a plan to have plans to send humans to Mars. As of right now, it isn't going, not with humans, and if you're depending on NASA to get you there, you are going to have a very long wait. Below, I'll list some of the things the agency would have done already if it was going to send humans to Mars (spoiler alert: they've done none of them).

Of course, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine is a very nice man and a competent manager and also very smart. I know him and admire and respect him. So why does he and others in NASA and nearly every person who has anything to do with human spaceflight in the federal government keep talking about going to Mars when they have orders to go to the moon?*

Sadly, it is because they like so many others are the victims of a Martian illusion promoted by a billionaire astronomer - sort of a star-gazing Bernie Madoff - more than a century ago. It is an illusion that just won't go away even though it is clearly a fantasy. Believe me, I take no joy in pointing this out because it is really kind of sad. So often, it isn't reality that is the most difficult to overcome when we have to face the truth but the fantasies that we carry in our heads.

Here is the story of that billionaire and how he started the entire fantasy about Mars that, even today, so thoroughly infects NASA, space policy wonks, and the public at large about human spaceflight and where people should try to set up shop "out there."

Here is Don Knotts, a fellow West Virginian, playing an astronaut
 that I'm including just because.

Recently, I had cause to research for a screenplay one Clyde Tombaugh, a nerdy but persistent fellow who discovered the dwarf planet Pluto in 1929 (just in time for the Depression but hey).

Clyde Tombaugh

In the process of studying Clyde's experiences, I ran across another interesting story, that of the very wealthy raconteur, author, and erstwhile astronomer who founded the Lowell Observatory, he being Dr. Percival Lowell, and his secretary, assistant, and mistress Miss Wrexi Louise Leonard who would become, against all odds, the first American female professional astronomer.

Percival Lowell at his telescope in his observatory

Wrexi Leonard making her own independent observations
at the Lowell Observatory

Dr. Lowell (an honorary title) was a very rich member of the Lowell family, a bunch of Boston Brahmins who were rumored to only talk to the Cabots who only talked to God. His sister was a cigar-smoking poet and also an avowed Lesbian. This was during the Gilded Age when Victorian mores were still in effect so Ms Lowell truly didn't care what anybody thought about much of anything. His brother was the President of Harvard, his other sister a well-known although somewhat eccentric philanthropist.

Amy Lowell, Percival's sister

With such siblings, I guess you could say that Percival came from interesting stock. On the other hand, when you're as rich as the Lowells were, I suppose being interesting might be somewhat natural.

Anyway, after exploring the sexual mores of the ladies of Asia and writing titillating memoirs about his experiences, Percival decided his next pursuit of the good life was to become an astronomer. He therefore constructed the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, dragged poor Wrexi out there with him, and got to work. Before long, he discovered Mars. Well, not really, as the planet had been known since ancient times but sort of because he saw it in ways nobody had ever seen it before.

One of Percival Lowell's many drawings of Mars

When Dr. Lowell studied Mars from his hilltop observatory above Flagstaff, he saw odd features on the red planet. The more he looked at them and drew them, the more he was convinced he was seeing signs of present or past intelligent life. Night after night, he drew what he saw which were lines that streaked across the planet, some of them intersecting in smudgy places as if on purpose. Before long, he was certain that what he was seeing were canals and the intersections were surely oases where the beings who had dug the canals were living.

Wrexi with Lowell Observatory staff

Since Lowell often left Wrexi alone at the observatory while he travelled hither and yon, she rolled up her sleeves and started to learn astronomy. A coal miner's daughter and therefore extremely intelligent, Wrexi also pretty much ran the facility. She published her observations in several prestigious scientific journals that were so well regarded the Mexican and the French Astronomical societies saw fit to give her awards and induct her into their organizations. This was nearly unprecedented for a female at that time.

Wrexi Leonard's observations of Mars in 1897

But back to Percival Lowell.

From his observations, Lowell conjured up the idea that Martians were building canals to transport water from the poles in order to sustain their civilization which was facing (or had faced) enormous climate change. Since Earthian scientists were then concerned about our own climate change due to the mini-ice age (hmmm...), this struck a public nerve.  Lowell wrote many books on these amazing lines and what they meant. He even went on the lecture circuit and, before long, Percival Lowell was something of a pop star of his age and Mars grew into a symbol of life on the edge that was eagerly clasped to its bosom by a repressed and somewhat anxious society which was thrilled there were creatures out there besides themselves who were probably equally miserable and scared.

Some books, mostly about Mars, by Percival Lowell

A careful reading of his writing (difficult as it's pretty dense stuff) shows it isn't entirely clear that Lowell believed his own hype. Actually, he saw that Europe was heading pan over skillet for the Great War and it was his hope that his Martian chronicles would demonstrate that people were better off cooperating in the face of disaster than killing one another off. Nonetheless, the Europeans saw fit to kill one another off by the millions which so disappointed Lowell that he died of a stroke at the young age of 61. Well, it may be that his battleaxe of a wife poisoned him since she was so jealous of Wrexi (my own theory completely devoid and utterly absent of any evidence) but nonetheless Lowell went to the great Mars in the sky, leaving his observatory to struggle on while Lowell's widow sued it and tried to destroy it until Clyde showed up and discovered Pluto but that's another story. Wrexi, by the way, was thrown out on the street by Lowell's wife and ended up in the poor house (literally).

Wrexi's tombstone. She died poor and alone.

Other than his failure to see that Miss Leonard was properly rewarded and cared for as a result of her long service to him and his family, Lowell's legacy was Mars, or the misunderstanding of what Mars really was, and his purplish prose about what he thought he saw spawned a vast array of fiction including Wells' War of the Worlds, Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, and Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles. Mars in the minds of so many readers became sort of a mini-Earth, or a place where another Earth might rise, and where humans should aspire to go because it was, well, Mars which beckoned with open arms. Besides these literate, exciting books, there came thousands and thousands of tales in book or film form set on a fictional Mars, nearly all of it grown straight out of Percival Lowell's imagination while he peered through his telescopes atop an Arizona mountain (the canals, by the by, might have been the reflection of the veins in his eyes). Lowell's prose was so romantic and his lectures so interesting that, over time, in nearly everyone's head Mars became not what it actually was but what everyone wanted it to be.

And there you go!

But then came a violent correction of Lowell's Martian dreams in the form of the truth.

Mariner IV - Dream Slayer

In 1965, NASA' s Mariner IV flew past Mars and took photos and other measurements. What it sent back shocked scientists and lay people still awash with Lowellian dreams of a ruddy but livable world. The photographs revealed only a tortured plain of craters and dirt. Moreover, the flyby confirmed that the Martian atmosphere was only about 1% of Earth's and almost entirely carbon dioxide. The planet also had no magnetic field. In other words, Mars was a dead planet. Dead, dead, dead.

Wait a minute, Mariner IV... Can this be right? This is Mars?

The midget planet (only one third the size of Earth) was now known to be nothing but a battered old red rock located far, far away but NASA (bless its heart for persistence) labored on in its study of the place but sadly now with the dream of a little globe somewhat like Earth totally crushed.

Lowell's dreamy depictions of Mars and all the fiction that had been built up around it, however, proved extremely difficult to suspend and, very soon, the ancient red corpse was being resurrected as a place where humans absolutely needed to go. This time, it was by none other than Dr. Wernher von Braun, something of a dreamer himself, who put Mars back up on its pedestal with a rhetorical stick up its, um, back to hold it up. This, oddly enough, was because of the Apollo moon program which, after an initial rush of excitement after the first landing and the thrill of the Apollo 13 rescue, quickly lapsed below the fold in interest by a bored public.

My cat Wyatt being bored like the American public. I am
including this because he's also cute (so is the American public)

As an aside, what could have happened at this point was that NASA and the American intelligentsia might have said to themselves, "You know, these Apollo flights have been great and we've learned a lot but they've kind of run their course with the present technology. Let's pause, consider what we've learned, and in the meantime slowly and responsibly build more robust systems to go to the lunar surface so that we might prosper from our success..."

Thinking like the Thinker, a somewhat untested process in the
 United States overall space program

But nooooo.

Before we scarcely got there, the moon flights were cancelled along with Dr. von Braun's extremely successful heavy lifting Saturn V rocket. Hurt by this rejection, the doctor latched onto Mars and waxed eloquently on it as a substitute destination. To get there, he conjured up a multi-tiered approach of building a space shuttle, then a space station, and then nuclear rocket engines that would propel twin spacecraft and their landers to the small red planet. He said to anyone who would listen that Mars was the "next moon" and so he prepared his pitch to the powers that be and it was a good one, too.

Dr. von Braun's Hail Mary Pass to Mars

Unfortunately...

The day after Dr. von Braun made his presentation on going to Mars to Vice President Agnew (soon to resign for taking bribes) and Congress (nobody resigned even though, well, you know), Mariner VII swept by Mars and revealed, yep, Mariner IV wasn't kidding. Mars was not only dead but it was really, really dead. Von Braun was therefore summarily dismissed, his presentation tossed in the trash can, and any idea of going to Mars was forgotten.

Thank you, Dr. von Braun.
We will consider your proposal carefully - Congress.

But not really. NASA yet persevered, this time in the 1970's with two Viking spacecraft that actually landed on the dusty little planet's surface, one of the experiments even looking for signs of life. The result of that experiment was no life was found... or was it? There was some uncertainty. Over the next few decades, NASA dispatched increasingly sophisticated spacecraft to the small planet for detailed studies. These probes showed Mars to be a lot more interesting than the Mariner and even the Viking missions predicted. It was a world that had once known flowing water and still had polar ice caps, had deep canyons and giant mountains, and was geologically diverse. Moreover, little American robots with cute names began to roam the Martian surface and as they went along, they began to take on personalities and were praised for being brave and hardy and true pioneers.

Curiosity Rover on Mars keeping it real.

Percival Lowell, in sheer delight at these developments, might have sat bolt upright if he wasn't dead under a concrete slab in a mausoleum his thoroughly irritated widow put him beneath on his observatory mountain which was called, wait for it, Mars Hill. That's right. Mars was in again! Let's go!

Constance Lowell at Percival's Mausoleum
"Hey there! How ya doin'?
I had your concubine Wrexi thrown in the street, just so you know!
I also sued your Observatory for its last dime! Have a nice death!"

And so the Martian myth came alive yet again just as NASA's space shuttle program was shut down for being too expensive and too dangerous, and its International Space Station, otherwise a magnificent construction, was unfortunately, no matter how one looked at it, adding very little to science and essentially nothing to the economy and therefore needed to be pitched just like Apollo was (I will resist putting another photo of The Thinker here).

But when reality fails, dreams can substitute. The Lowellian fantasy floated right back into people's heads. We need to go to Mars! Soon, children picked up on what the adults at NASA were saying and little red planets began to circle their heads. Noticing, NASA public relations folks changed We need to go to Mars! to We're going to Mars! And then after praise came their way for their declaration, there came a shazam! realization within the old agency that, to continue that praise, the leaders there didn't actually have to do the hard work of building anything to go to Mars! It only had to say it was going and people, especially young people, adored them and their agency! So they kept saying it and saying it and pretty soon the highnesses of NASA came to believe it, too. We're going to Mars!

We're going to Mars!

But, while they were saying it, NASA did nothing to make it a reality. Not. A. Thing.

Accepting for the moment that humans need to go to this small, reddish, essentially airless and radiation-washed planet because it's just marvelous there, what is it that needs to be done so that we complex and quite fragile organisms (who get sick and die on Mount Everest which is Disney World compared to Mars) might actually go and live there? Well, let's list some of them and see where we are.

 1. Testing of spacecraft large enough to sustain a crew for two years going and coming.  - Nothing accomplished or even proposed.**
 2. Testing of habitats that would sustain humans on an airless, radiation-washed planet for any length of time - Nothing accomplished or even proposed.
 3. Testing of Martian landers. - Nothing accomplished or even proposed.
 4. Testing of artificial gravity in order to ameliorate the harmful effects of long-term microgravity (use of centrifugal forces?) - Nothing accomplished or even proposed.**
 5. Testing of shielding or medicine to ameliorate the harmful effects of radiation during spaceflight or the Martian surface - Nothing accomplished or even proposed.**
 6. Testing of power sources on the Martian surface (nuclear and solar generators?) - Nothing accomplished but some proposals with minor funding and relaxed schedules.
 7.  Testing of advanced propulsion systems to ameliorate long journey across the nothingness between Earth and Mars (nuclear?) - Nothing accomplished but some proposals with minor funding and relaxed schedules.

** Could have been tested on the International Space Station but wasn't which tells the tale I'm getting at very well.

Mars Plans? We don't have no stinkin' Mars Plans!

I could go on but I think the point is made. NASA has accomplished essentially nothing to get ready to send humans to Mars and there is virtually nothing in the pipeline. Still and yet, they keep saying We're going to Mars! even while being ordered to instead go to the moon. Well, actually, that command has forced them to modify their battlecry by putting it this way: We're going to the moon so we can go to Mars! Uh huh, right.

By the way, not talking about Elon here. That boy might just give it a go but that's on his dime which probably has the head of Percival Lowell on it rather than President Roosevelt's. Do it, Mr. Musk. I will cheer you on. Glad you liked The Dinosaur Hunter, by the way.

Elon reading The Dinosaur Hunter and being thoroughly amused.

And speaking of me...

Just about everyone who pays the slightest bit of attention to my writing about space (a small percentage of my literary output but still...) knows that I am a hopeless human domiciliary lunaphile (that means I love the idea of people living on the moon and doesn't mean something bad) and believe that we as a civilization have much productive work scientifically and economically to do on the planet that circles us. Just as Mars, the more we look at the moon, the more interesting it becomes. One difference is the moon is accessible by humans while Mars simply isn't. Another is humans have real work to do on the moon, work that will make life on Earth better, its people wealthier and more knowledgable and even spur some of them to actually live and work and raise families there. By the by, I could not possibly care less who the next professional astronaut, regardless of gender, who steps on the moon is. I only care who the next plumber, carpenter, mechanic, miner, or electrician is. The moon may be for scientists but it, like Antarctica and West Virginia, is also for blue collar workers who know how to build things and keep them running. That, to me, is really exciting to contemplate!

My trilogy of moon books, not counting Back to the Moon

My book the Vice President likes.

In fact, I believe the moon is vastly more important to us as a species than Mars will ever be. By utilizing the resources of our nearby neighbor, we can create a spacefaring civilization that, for decades to come, will be mostly back and forth between us and our newly installed lunar brethren and sisteren. But to build what we need on the moon and properly explore it, we're going to have to do a lot of work while not being distracted by that shiny Lowellian myth known as Mars.

Moi and my favorite planet not counting the one I'm presently on.

So, NASA and Mr. Bridenstine, I really regret having to be so pedantic about this entire Mars business but this is the unfortunate truth. You sending astronauts to Mars isn't going to happen because, not only haven't you prepared for it in any way, it probably shouldn't happen. There is absolutely nothing there that needs people. Unless our technology makes a huge leap, or something so extraordinary is discovered on this midget planet that we must go have a look with our real eyeballs, we need to accept the reality (I know it's difficult and I hate it as much as you) that Mars is a hideously awful place, worse than anything you can imagine. It will kill you every which way from Sunday and laugh while it's doing it. And should people go there, they will always be an economic drain, never adding anything back to the Earthians who spent a fortune to send them there except photographs of them desperately waiting for the next supply ship (should it ever come). It will be worse than the colonists on Roanoke Island who at least had air to breathe and water to drink and didn't have to live underground to keep from glowing in the dark but still  disappeared way back when without a trace except for a pathetic word "CROATOAN" on a tree. Maybe the Martian colonists will stamp out a similar message in the dust for any visitors who should happen by to find their remains.

"Hey soldier, do you understand what this means?"
"Not a clue, sir."
"Well, where is everybody?"
"Um, well, perhaps something's amiss, sir."

Again, I'm really sorry for being fussy but let's just stop all this Mars stuff and go to the place where we need to go for economic as well as scientific reasons and please stop saying it's only so we can go to Mars. It's a big fib and an unnecessary one. Don't take me wrong. I absolutely believe Mars should be explored by the federal government's space agency but by robots and AI which every year get better and better and are extensions of we humans, anyway. They'll get us all the information we need and, after all, that's all you're really planning to do so all I'm saying is let's stay real and let Dr. Lowell rest.

Quote from Percival Lowell on his mausoleum

But I'm not as certain we should let Wrexi rest. That woman deserves a medal for putting up with Percival and winning honors for her astronomical work before being shoved into a pauper's grave. How about a Wrexi Leonard Avenue?

Miss Wrexi Leonard,
the first professional female astronomer in the United States

Thank you,

Homer

* Sadly, when told in the Oval Office that we were headed back to the moon, the President jumped into the fray by saying we were going to Mars. What we have here, as the famous quote in Cool Hand Luke had it, is a failure to communicate. If our return of humans to Luna had been properly presented to President Trump as an opportunity to expand the American economy by setting up permanently crewed outposts from which commercial and scientific entities could move into the lunar hinterlands to gather resources and knowledge, he would have probably been on board. But nooooo. Instead, he like so many others who have little background in human spaceflight besides movies and the usual Lowellian fantasies, jumped right into it which got NASA leaders, also immersed in the same fantastic dreams of a planet that doesn't actually exist, making decisions based on "turn and burn" from the moon to Mars which may see everything ultimately cancelled. A goal without a plan may just be a wish but a plan with the wrong goal is worse.

A short discussion of the Core Stage of the SLS and my novels Back to the Moon/Crater

Since my blog is read by the readers of Goodreads.com, I find it always a good idea to include some reference to one or more of my books no matter what I'm writing about. Since I am about to explain what the situation is with a great big rocket that NASA is trying to build that may be used to go to the moon, let me just say everybody not interested in this rather esoteric commentary but still interested in fictional accounts of going to and living on the moon should just read my wonderfully literate (and often funny) novels Back to the Moon and the marvelous trilogy (literate, funny, all) that began with Crater and then continued with Crescent followed by The Lunar Rescue Company. You can read about them and my other books here: www.homerhickam.com.

Now, with my GoodReads readers taken care of, let me explain in condensed fashion the problems with the core stage of the Space Launch System, aka SLS, and why it is what we euphemistically call the "long pole" of the development of this rocket. In other words, the core stage is the most difficult of all the components of the SLS to design and construct and will take the longest amount of time to prepare.

Why is that? Well, although vastly simplified, here are some of the reasons.

The core stage, which is really the first stage, utilizes as its base the design and materials of the external tank (ET) of the old space shuttle. This is because Congress required that NASA use components from the shuttle to build the SLS which must have seemed the right thing to do at the time. After all, here was a big rocket that already worked - the space shuttle and all. Just move its parts around a little bit, tweak them some, slap a new name on the resulting rocket, and away you go.*

Using the components of the shuttle to make a new rocket might be compared with remodeling a house. For those of us who have done both, we know that a remodel of a house is filled with problems that building a house from the ground up doesn't have. There are a lot of compromises required for the remodel that is avoided by a fresh start with a clean sheet.

With orders to turn the ET into a booster stage, the engineers assigned to it first ran into the problem that the tank would be subject to forces that were outside the scope of its original design. The ET was a marvel in engineering but it was supposed to take side mount forces (i.e., be dragged upward), not be pushed from below with a heavy load on top. In terms of forces, this is the difference between throwing a beer can (very little force on it other than flying through the air) and placing it upright on the ground and squashing it with the heel of your boot. Just like the beer can, the core stage is going to be crushed from above by the heavy upper stages while being shoved really hard from the bottom by multiple engines.

Faced with the requirement to build a rocket utilizing components outside their original design and function, SLS engineers responded by making the ET shell much stronger with lots of bracing.  The designers were also faced with having to stretch the ET so it could hold more propellant which meant more bracing, all of which added weight. And then there was another force, much more insidious, that the designers had to face. Vibration. The two five-segment solid rocket motors (these also adapted from the space shuttle) strapped to the core stage is going to shake it like the San Francisco earthquake. Essentially a somewhat brittle aluminum egg, it's difficult to predict what will happen no matter how much extra support is added.

And then there are the friction-stir welds which are used throughout the core stage. If you don't know what this technique is, please go here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friction_stir_welding

Friction-stir welds are not an unknown as NASA has been doing such welds for a long time and SpaceX has, too. They've just never experienced as much force and vibration on such welds before. SpaceX is a nice, smooth ride since all its engines are liquid. As mentioned before, a 5-segment stretch SRB is going to shake the bejesus out of the core stage and those welds. Again, how much vibration the core stage will receive is not entirely understood. That's why vibration tests were done in Huntsville. Computer models are also being run. Sadly, ultimately, the only certain way to find out the real answer is to fly the blame thing.

Another problem has to do with heat around the base. The ET, while being very strong, was thermally very fragile. Witness the Challenger. When a flame played around its base, it melted right through. On the SLS, the base of the core stage is going to receive a hotfoot by the engines strapped to its bottom. To protect it, a lot of extra shielding compared to the ET is needed down there. How much is required is not entirely understood. That's the reason for the so-called green test at Stennis that will see the engines lit. Unfortunately, those lit engines are reusable shuttle engines that are going to be thrown away. When they are used up, another kind of rocket engine is going to have to be attached at the base which means all the previous tests will have to be done again.

So there it is in a nutshell, the problems Boeing and NASA have to solve on the SLS core stage, partly because they didn't start with a clean sheet. If they had, their core stage would have probably looked a whole lot like a wide-body Falcon 9 and maybe it would have been built faster and cheaper and better.

One thing I'd like to make clear: I am not criticizing SLS engineers in this piece. My purpose is only to clarify its problems which we keep hearing about and has caused many schedule slips. The Boeing and NASA SLS engineers are doing their very best to prepare this rocket to fly and they should be praised for their work.

However, because of the problems which still loom over this rocket, my recommendation from the get-go when the Vice President decided we were going back to the moon was to take the SLS out of the critical path to the moon and instead develop it, including some flights,  to where it could be put in storage and brought into service if needed later. If that concept isn't viable, I think SLS should only be used for cargo flights, not for astronauts. This would allow NASA to relax its schedule a little and make sure everything is OK before proceeding while using SpaceX and Blue Origin rockets to test out the Orion capsule and send it for a loop around the moon. But, for what may be more political reasons than technical, NASA seems to want the core stage to be ready right away, no matter what.


* As an aside for you history buffs, Ford did that very thing with the Edsel building it on the chassis of the already-existing Fairlane and Galaxie.