The HCOS Weekly Tenth Edition
î ˘e Next Big Step?
For more info: http://www.mars-one.com/ http://www.spacex.com/
By Noah Penner - (Sorry folks, no random movie review this week!) From April 22 to August 21 last year, I had the capability to choose whether to leave Earth forever. While it sounds like either a fantasy or science-fiction setup, the idea has actually become quite real, and has been mentioned by almost all major news sources several times already: Mars One, a private spaceflight proposal to send the first humans to Mars while also setting up the first Martian colony. While many such proposals have floated around since the beginning of space travel itself, only in recent years have people started to pay attention, mainly due to the ending of the Space Shuttle program and the subsequent downsizing of NASA. In 2012, SpaceX, a company founded by Elon Musk (the real-life inspiration for the modern portrayal of Tony Stark in Iron Man) successfully docked their unmanned spacecraft Dragon to the Interna-
tional Space Station, becoming the first private organization to do so. Plans for the manned version of Dragon are under development, with the first astronauts likely flying to the ISS aboard the spacecraft around 2016. Simply put, they've built a reliable, ambitious, and politics-free space program that countries and companies alike can buy into. In a recent statement issued by the Canadian Space Agency, the low price of SpaceX's flights as supposed to Russian flights mean that the next Canadian astronaut will likely travel to the ISS not aboard the decades-old Soyuz spacecraft, but aboard the American-launched Dragon. This is where Mars One starts from. The proposal operates on a valid, ever-so-true point: Going to Mars is easy, as shown by the dozen rovers and probes various countries have landed there over the years. Getting back to Earth is the problem; not only do you have to haul all the necessary fuel with you, dramati-
cally complicating the mission, but you have to worry about dangers like radiation and long-term exposure to weightlessness. To this date, no spacecraft has ever managed such a feat; the only reason we have Mars rocks here on Earth is because they've been ejected by various geological forces long ago and were lucky enough to head in our direction, not completely burn up in the atmosphere, and not land in a deep ocean. Mars One's idea is to land several Dragon capsules on the Martian surface, organizing them and expanding them using inflatable segments that will later be buried for safety reasons by later colonists. When the base is set up using a combination of rovers on the Martian surface and mission controllers here on Earth, the first colonists will arrive, and spend the rest of their lives maintaining the colony, exploring and analyzing the Martian surface, perhaps, but not likely to return to Earth at a later date. They will grow their own food, perform their