All aboard the Big Fucking Rocket to Mars!

All aboard the Big Fucking Rocket to Mars!

You may not have given any serious thought to whether or not you would choose to leave our planet, but one day, humans may have to.

Our best option in the foreseeable future is to live on Mars, though nearly every aspect of the planet and the journey it would take to get you there is hostile to the human body and mind.

Within our lifetime, Mars will play host to its first set of human footprints – turning a section of human history into an entry-level science fiction plot. The grim fact stands that one day we will be snuffed out by a flip in the magnetic field, the rise of artificial superintelligence, climate change, a simple asteroid, or just gobbled up by the sun - and Earth will no longer be a viable home. Due to this reality, we humans have two choices; become an interplanetary species or suffer inevitable species extinction here on Earth.

So why Mars? At first glance, it seems like a pretty shitty place to move if you’re from Earth.

Mars’s atmosphere is 96 percent carbon dioxide, with small amounts of other unbreathable shit. Temperatures can plummet to -153 degrees Celsius, so if you can imagine being naked and wet after a cold shower in the middle of winter in Antarctica, you’re still not even in the ballpark of how it would feel on the surface of Mars (hint: you’d be dead mate).

Mars is about half the size of Earth with 24.6 hour days, which is ideal for humans and plants to adapt to. Mars’s gravity is a third of the gravity of Earth (so, fortunately, launching a craft from Mars would take far less energy than from Earth). The atmospheric pressure is too low to hold a stable body of water in place – meaning Mars cannot sustain surface oceans.

Despite all of this, Mars is still considered to be just within our sun’s habitable zone. Also known as the ‘Goldilocks Zone’, this is the range of distances from the sun that a planet can sustain liquid water with enough atmospheric pressure to keep it on the surface, a definition that arose from the notion that water is necessary for all life to flourish. Mars still scrapes in because it once had oceans and could have them again in the right conditions.

There is a metric buttload of ice at the poles; if it melted, it would cover Mars’s surface with water about 10-12m deep. Melting this ice would release trapped carbon dioxide and water vapour, which would beef up the atmosphere, trapping more heat from the sun, leading to a runaway greenhouse effect that would make Mars lush and habitable, with oceans once more. Until such time, we could live in cool little volcanic tunnels underground, using skateboards to cruise through the tunnels, while we terraform the planet.

Thankfully, some of the world’s best minds are engaged in getting all this goddamn crazy futuristic shit to work. There are myriad issues with transporting humans to Mars and sustaining a population upon arrival, and all of them are pretty damn arduous to overcome.

The human body does not cope well in low gravity, making a five-month trip to the Red Planet a sharp assault on one’s physical health. When in zero gravity for extended periods of time, blood rises to pool in the head, exerting pressure on the eyeballs and brain, sometimes rendering the traveller with cerebral and/or visual impairment (and the mother of all puffy faces). 

Also, without gravity to provide physical resistance muscles atrophy severely. Unless the traveller can maintain a vigorous exercise regime while in space, they could find that they touch down on Mars, step off the craft and immediately break their legs. This isn’t helped by the fact that on average you lose one percent of your bone mass for every month you are in space – a condition endowed with the creepy name “spaceflight osteopenia”.

Provided you do make it to Mars with your vision, brain, bones, and functional muscle tissue, you’re still in the harshest environment known to man. Freezing temperatures, dust that can rip through your lungs like glass shards, and radiation from solar flares and cosmic rays (high-energy particles travelling across the galaxy at lightspeed), which can damage brain cells and DNA, are but a few of the environmental joys of your new home.

Let’s say you have secure protection from the elements – there is also the jarring psychological impact of seeing nothing but red, rocky, dusty desert all day. Astronauts who have spent time on the International Space Station have reported levels of mental deterioration due to not having access to the natural greenery that humans are accustomed to. 

So, assuming our minds and bodies can overcome the limitations of prolonged space travel, how are we even going to get humans up to Mars, let alone keep life going once we are there?

The first half of that question is being impressively answered by Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX (he’s also responsible for Tesla electric cars, the Tesla Gigafactory, and Paypal). In 2016 Musk publicly unveiled his vision to take one million people (his estimate of how many people it will take to successfully establish a human colony) to Mars, beginning in 2024 – and he ultimately wants to do this for under USD$200,000 per seat. Currently, the cost per seat would be around USD$10 billion.

He plans to bring down that cost with SpaceX’s Big Fucking Rocket and reusable launch system. Previously named the Mars Colonial Transporter/Interplanetary Transport System, the Big Fucking Rocket is what Musk has dubbed the huge bastard that’s going to transport 100 people at a time to Mars. An apt name, the Big Fucking Rocket is FUCKING BIG. Standing at 122 metres tall, it easily dwarfs both the Statue of Liberty and Big Ben, it is just shy of the Great Pyramid of Giza. If you were to vertically stack the Richardson Building three times, or the University Clocktower four, they’d be almost the same height as the Big Fucking Rocket. 

The reason for the aforementioned $10 billion per seat is because, historically, every space launch had required brand-new, or expensively refurbished, boosters (the rockets attached to spacecraft which accelerate lift-off enough to launch the craft successfully). 

Enter SpaceX’s relandable (and thus cheaply reusable) booster rocket. 

Rockets are often comprised of several smaller rockets, called stages, which provide more oomph and altitude for the craft, before detaching individually (the Big Fucking Rocket will probably be a two-stage rocket, with a gargantuan first stage and a second stage that includes the craft itself). 

With relandable technology, instead of the first stage detaching and falling to earth with a parachute, needing recovery and repair (damn, NASA that’s just plain wasteful), SpaceX’s booster will detach, flip around, boostback burn the engines to find trajectory, then burn the engines once more to decelerate upon re-entry, coming to a controlled touchdown on a landing platform. So if you’ve heard about any successful SpaceX launches or landings lately, you’re actually hearing about the implementation of all this cool stuff. The Falcon 9 first-stage landing tests have been going since 2013, and progress is booming.

SpaceX also uses these tests to address how we are going to land a craft on Mars’s thin-ass atmosphere. The atmosphere is too thin to help slow the craft yet thick enough to cause overheating; meaning that using parachutes for such a heavy craft is out. The heaviest thing ever landed on Mars is the one tonne Curiosity Rover (which heart-wrenchingly sings itself ‘Happy Birthday’ alone every year on 5 August), and NASA had to use a combination of chutes, retrorockets and a dangling sky crane to accomplish this.

The Big Fucking Rocket is going to have a cargo 450 times the weight of the Curiosity Rover, so SpaceX has come up with a more elegant solution – supersonic retropropulsion. This involves reversing down with the booster rocket firing in order to slow the craft’s descent – so when Falcon boosters are at a high altitude here, they are firing their engines for re-entry burn in conditions here on the Earth that are incredibly similar to Mars. 

Musk plans to test this technology on Mars in 2018 – and NASA is assisting in exchange for any new data accumulated. Not that they even needed to ask, as Musk has already volunteered his Falcon 9 landing test data to NASA - saving US taxpayers millions of dollars, according to NASA’s associate administrator for Space Technology, Michael Gazarick.

In order to establish a colony, we’re going to need resources to the tune of energy, water, oxygen, shelter and fuel. Obviously, the more resources we can score from Mars itself, the better: to save hauling stuff from Earth. Currently, there is a lot of research going into how we can optimize the resources already available on Mars.

Food and shelter are the least problematic initial resources to manage. We can easily bring up food and equipment for growing crops. Plants are currently being tested here on Earth in soil chemically similar to Martian soil, which contains phosphorus, nitrogen, potassium and iron, which are all vital for plants to grow. A bit of tweaking of Martian soil to give it more nitrogen and water would really get the job done nicely, but I’m sure there’s also a bunch of Mark Watneys out there testing it out with potatoes and excrement. In the meantime, there’s always freeze-dried food until the crops are ready. 

With regards to shelter, you couldn’t get much cooler than what some scientists have proposed: living in lava tubes. Motherfucking lava tubes. These are tunnel caves naturally sculpted from hardened lava after the molten rock has flowed through, which on Mars are theorised to be larger than the ones here on Earth, which kind of makes sense when you consider that the largest volcano (and mountain) in the solar system, Olympus Mons, is on Mars. Because these lava tubes are surrounded by metres of solid rock, they would offer protection from cosmic rays and solar radiation - things that the surface can’t protect you from without an atmosphere or magnetic field.

Energy could be provided by any combination of nuclear, solar or portable. NASA has been developing a fission reaction system (not to be confused with a nuclear fusion reaction, which is what the sun does constantly) for use on Mars. Buried under the Martian surface, the reactor would be surrounded by a radiation shield and could provide constant power.

A nuclear battery could offer the colony portable power (which it already does for the spacecraft) – this is a radioisotope thermoelectric generator that converts heat into electricity and lasts a heck of a long time, which is great as long as you have lots of plutonium available to make them (but we don’t, which is why Doc Brown had to pull a fast one on the Libyans to get some for the Delorean). 

A more attractive option is solar energy, however it would only be viable as a secondary source to nuclear fission due to the difficulty of garnering sunlight on Mars. Not only is Mars further from the sun than Earth, also much of the incoming solar rays would be blocked by the huge dust storms that frequent the surface of the planet.

Further in the future, however, after terraforming creates an atmosphere and oceans, solar and other renewable energy sources, such as wind and tidal power, could take centre stage. 

Obviously, water and oxygen are the two most important resources humans will need on Mars. Water could come from a few different sources: by melting the ice at the poles, from the huge hidden glaciers that the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s ground-penetrating radar has discovered, or even frozen water extracted from the soil and microwaved. 

Beds made from the mineral zeolite could extract moisture from the air and then be microwaved to release water vapour, which could then be stored as ice. Theoretically there are a number of ways in which atmospheric carbon dioxide gas could be turned into oxygen or used to make fuel for spacecraft leaving Mars. For instance, a combination of carbon dioxide and engineered bacterium could create methane for fuel, and water from which to extract oxygen.

These necessities look like they will eventually be met by our ever-developing technology, as Dr. Ian “Jeff Goldblum” Malcolm stated so sexily back in 1993: “life finds a way”. If we can figure out how to supply ourselves with energy, water, food, air and shelter on Mars, it’s inevitable that we will one day denounce the evils of truth and love and extend our reach to the stars above.

This article first appeared in Issue 2, 2017.
Posted 12:16pm Sunday 26th February 2017 by Chelle Fitzgerald.