The race for Mars is ongoing. — 123rf.com
UNITED STATES officials huddled with their allies last summer in London to discuss the strategy of their upcoming lunar and Martian missions, focusing intensely on Beijing’s intentions, says Nicolas Maubert, space counselor at the French Embassy in Washington.
France has relationships in space with both China and the US.
“We see what China is doing – they’re moving really, really fast,” Maubert said.
Humanity’s pursuit of returning to the moon is not “for the pleasure of staying on the moon”, said Maubert.
It is to learn how to keep humans alive on a celestial body for long periods of time before venturing far beyond – to Mars.
But traveling to Mars makes a trip to the moon look easy, said Jim Bridenstine, US space agency Nasa administrator under former President Donald Trump.
“Humanity is going to eventually walk on the surface of Mars, and I think that is going to be an exceptional moment,” Bridenstine added. “Who will be there first? I don’t know.”
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With conventional technology, launch opportunities to Mars come along just once every 26 months. It is roughly an eight-month journey each way. Missing a launch window could mean a delay of several years, and if something goes wrong midflight, the crew will be on its own in deep space.
The sheer length of the journey means a crew will be exposed to dangerous levels of radiation and need more food, equipment and physical and mental stamina than any previous mission ever tested.
Then they will have to land through an atmosphere that is thick enough to kill them but too thin to be used as a break to slow their descent to the surface. Should they succeed, they will be on the other side of the sun with no one there to help them.
“Artemis is a step towards Mars in the way that taking a step out of the front door of your house in New York is a step towards Paris,” said Casey Dreier, chief of space policy for The Planetary Society, a space policy advocacy group founded by Carl Sagan.
Nasa aims to reach Mars by 2040 and is working on entirely new technologies for the mission, Nelson said, including the production of a nuclear thermal propulsion engine that Nasa hopes will cut the travel time in half.
Tabitha Dodson is leading the effort at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, to resurrect a thermal nuclear engine project that first began in the Apollo era but sat on a shelf after the US abandoned manned spaceflight in the 1970s.
“I feel a very powerful sense of urgency,” Dodson said. “There’s just this perfect storm of support, all up and down the various government agencies nationwide – in Congress and at the presidential level – to the point where I feel like we have to get this done, right now, because we might miss our chance.”
Dodson said she has “high confidence” DARPA and its main private industry partner, Lockheed Martin, will successfully demonstrate their rocket, known as DRACO, in 2027.
From there, dozens of scientists led by a team out of the Idaho National Laboratory are working to build on DRACO’s anticipated success, increasing the efficiency of the components necessary for a nuclear thermal rocket to work on longer missions.
“There’s additional technology that needs to be developed to have the higher capability that you need for the Mars mission,” Sebastian Corbisiero, senior technical advisor for advanced concepts at the Idaho National Laboratory, said in an interview.
Dodson and Corbisiero both acknowledged working toward an internal deadline of reaching Mars by 2040 and expressed confidence it could be reached.
Chinese officials, too, appear to be working on a nuclear propulsion project of their own.
In November 2022, on Hainan Island, where China has built a launch site for its heaviest rockets, Wu Weiren, an architect of China’s lunar programme, made a presentation that previewed China’s plans for future missions that included spaceship designs to accommodate nuclear electric engines, according to slides of the proposal.
“Mars is the horizon goal,” said Scott Pace, executive secretary of the National Space Council under Trump. “Landing on Mars – if they’re able to do it – would play into China’s narrative as the great power of the 21st Century. But having that goal and doing it are two different things.”
Chinese officials have remained quiet on their plans for a manned mission to Mars. In 2021, at a conference on space exploration in Russia, a senior executive at China’s main space launch vehicle manufacturer said that Beijing had a roadmap to send humans and establish a base there in the mid-2030s.
The fate of China’s robotic rover on Mars, sent with great fanfare the same year but that died just months into its mission, may have demonstrated for Beijing the challenges ahead. “They are discovering that Mars is hard,” one US intelligence official said.
US officials dismissed the executive’s remarks, questioning the viability of such an aggressive timeline and whether he was speaking for the government.
But state media reported on it. And it would not be the first time that Beijing’s space programme surprised the world.
“The Chinese say this all the time: Crawl, walk, run,” said Dean Cheng, of the US Institute of Peace. “They invoke this for every major scientific programme.”
“They take their time at first,” he added, “but culminate in a sprint.” — TNS
