Mike Collins Prefers Mars Over The Moon
2009 Michael Collins Interviews Michael Collins UPDATED for the 50th Anniversary July 2019
“Q. Okay but getting back to the space program. What’s next?
A. I hope Mars. It was my favorite planet as a kid and still is. As celestial bodies go, the moon is not a particularly interesting place, but Mars is. It is the closest thing to a sister planet that we have found so far. I worry that at NASA’s creeping pace, with the emphasis on returning to the moon, Mars may be receding into the distance. I would advocate for a “JFK Express to Mars”. President Kennedy’s 1961 mandate to land man on the moon within the decade was a masterpiece of simplicity and we invoked it often to get the job done.”
That makes sense – he mentioned Mars Direct when Trump was asking about Mars in one of your earlier posts.
I disagree with him about the Moon. I think it’s a very interesting place, not least because odds are we’ll learn a lot about the ancient Earth from doing geology and chemistry research there. But Mars is extremely interesting.
Ever since the 2024 deadline was given for a return to the Moon, the Moon has ceased being an interest of scientific observation.
Because it’s a suicide mission to set such a close deadline, particularly for no reason other than Trump’s ego.
What? Five years?
You should be jumping for joy a President is actually expending political capital (by setting a deadline before the end of his second term) to move NASA forward. Sorry that means NASA actually has to perform in said time frame.
I’d be jumping for joy if an engaged, mature, intelligent President carefully weighed the pros and cons of going to the moon based on expert advice from the science community and his own research, and then set a reasonable target date to meet that goal. NOT to just have something to brag about when he leaves office.
Could you define “suicide mission” for me? I assume NASA won’t be sending anyone to the Moon without a vehicle and propellent for a return trip. Suicide generally means something planned and intentional.
At what point would you draw the line between “high risk” and “suicide”? I assume the 93% fatality rate experienced by Magellan’s 1519-1522 expedition would be above your threshold. But that wasn’t considered suicidal and follow-up voyages were being planned almost as soon as those 18 people and one ship got back. (Actually, Spain at the time was strongly Catholic monarchy, and the king would not and could not support any “suicidal” venture.)
And, yes, that was a long time ago. What about modern, high-risk hobbies? I live in a city which is a magnet for rock climbers. Reading about fatal climbing accidents in the local paper isn’t a daily event, but I don’t think I’d be too far off if I said it was a monthly event. Does that make rock climbing a “suicidal” hobby?
There is also the question of who gets to make that decision about acceptable and unacceptable risks. Should it be you or the person who would be taking the risks?
Well, suicide mission may have been a bit of an exaggeration but they’ll be launching on a vehicle with very little testing. The Saturn V had two unmanned test launches where they uncovered a lot of problems (mostly on the SECOND test flight) before the first manned launch of Apollo 8.
It’s interesting that many of the Apollo astronauts and scientists of that era took the moon for a desolate, hopelessly dry, and uninteresting place. If they haven’t kept up over the decades since, they don’t know how much more interesting our little Luna has become because of the knowledge brought back in the rocks they themselves loaded aboard the LEM and the discovery by robotic spacecraft of so much water there. It still isn’t a garden spot but it has the potential of providing resources to the Earth and setting up a moon-Earth economy. Mars, however, is a different story entirely. It’s interesting but not for human exploration at least not now and perhaps forever because of the rapid development of Artificial Intelligence. My take: https://homerhickamblog.blo… and https://homerhickamblog.blo…
Certainly humans will get to Mars and even establish permanent settlements there. However, we currently do not know the threshold REDUCED gravity levels required to ameliorate the negative effects of zero-g. The Moon is a necessary first step to start to determine what is necessary BEFORE we go to Mars. The Moon is the place to start those studies. Once we have data on up to two years of 1/6g, or, if necessary constructing centrifuges that produce 3/8g (the level on Mars), we can figure out what to do to keep humans well.
I don’t care if AI reaches the level of Mr. Data on StarTrek. Humans will go to Mars and beyond! That is in our nature. You can “train” a robot to take a picture of a beautiful Martian landscape. But it will never be able to appreciate the beauty thereof. And if one can be programmed to “appreciate” such a phenomenon…then it will have become human!
Ad Luna! Ad Ares! Ad Astra!
I said I was sorry! And I get where you’re coming from and you’re truly not alone. Fantasies that have been absorbed into our brains are the hardest things for most people to lose. That’s why I understand that my commentary on Mars can be jarring to an entire belief system that not only seems real but gets a lot of support from others who believe in the same thing. But it’s like those cities beneath the sea that when I was a kid everybody said we were going to build. I’m still looking for them, too, but realistically… sorry!
Just a difference in philosophy. Of course, I don’t say when we will get humans to Mars. I hope to see humans set foot on Mars. But at the rate we are going, I might see it for my 108th birthday! (I’ll be 77 later this week!) Meantime, we need to concentrate on the Moon for various reasons, including, but not limited to ISRU development, human physiology research, etc.
Exploration is in our genes. There were, of course practical reasons of finding food, but there was certainly a curiosity of what lay beyond the next hill that drove our ancestors to leave Africa.
Without the drive to “see what’s beyond the next hill” we stagnate and die!
Ad Luna! Ad Ares! Ad Astra!
Actually, as I showed in my ISDC presentation last month, it is far easier to build 1G communities on the Moon, and Mars, then in open space. The first pioneers might be living at low gravity for a while, but eventually 1G settlements will be built on both worlds.
As for the cities under the sea, the LOS Treaty and proximity of land made them impractical economically although they are possible from an engineering perspective.
For the edification of the NASAWatchers, I’ll tell you why I write about the difficulties of Mars. In fact, it would be a lot better for me as the Rocket Boy to be all rah-rah about going to the red planet and setting up shop there but I’m also on the board of Space Camp/Academy and on a sub-group of the National Space Council which leads me to do my best to exorcise the fantasies that are out there about Mars and spaceflight in general. It is wrong, in my opinion, to tell this generation that they’re going to Mars because they probably aren’t and to tell them they are is to invite cynicism over their adult lives. The moon is a real possibility and even probability and so is an Earth-moon economy where lots of people will get involved so that’s what I want young people to get excited about, not a fantasy about a planet that only exists in the imaginations of sci-fi writers. And that’s just one of the reasons why I drop in some tough love on the fourth rock out. As for the NSC and NASA, it galls me that Mr. Bridenstine and company and politicians who theoretically support the space program just tack on Mars to everything they say as if it’s a given we should go there after we get those pesky moon flights out of the way when I know how NASA works and what it’s capable of doing and therefore believe, very sadly, it simply isn’t up to the task of going to a place like Mars without a wholesale reorganization from the top down. I have also seen astronauts whose names you’d recognize wilt when confronted with tough situations physically and psychologically – god bless them, they’re only human – so I have that in my background which informs me that a place like Mars is going to be astonishingly hard for people to go to and survive there without a massive effort more similar to D-Day than Apollo with casualties more similar to the former than the latter, not to mention the people on the ground who will also be worn out, burned out, and tossed out. Also, as an explorer of land and sea, I have seen too many enthusiasts who go with me who soon realize they’re not up to the task even though they were sure they were and then I’ve had to somehow get them extracted from the field. So, sorry for putting down an entire planet and people going there, but I do have my reasons and I kind of think I’m right.
I agree. Mars is very difficult which is why it will be necessary to industrialize the Moon first before going there. It’s not a mission you really want to do with a single ship, it’s one that more likely requires a fleet of four to six. And long before we go to the surface of the planet we need to set up a base on Phobos to stage from. That of course will require a robust logistic system to build and support, one that is not possible without the Moon.
There is also the question of life on Mars. The more data that comes in the more I believe that the Vikings did find life, but we need to be sure and keep boots off the surface until then. A Phobos base would be well suited to study Mars to determine if there is life and that would be one of it’s functions. And yes, I think it would be possible to give it artificial gravity like a settlement on the Moon to counter the health effects of microgravity, but again the requires a robust space infrastructure.
In terms of economics, Mars has too deep a gravity well and just enough atmosphere to make lifting anything of possible export value very difficult. And it’s difficult to see any resources that couldn’t be developed easier on the Moon or from asteroids. As such I have never bought into the idea of a Mars-Earth economy. Perhaps someday it will be like Antarctica where tourists go to gawk at the landscape, but that is a long, long way in the future.
But Mars does seem to grab the human imagination. It inspired Mr. Lowell to write fanciful stories on it the 1890’s that inspired Dr. Goddard to invent liquid fuel rockets. It inspired Dr. von Braun to build rockets and it’s been a long term goal of American space advocates since folks started seriously writing about space travel in the 1940’s. That is why I think NASA keeps returning to it as a goal and should probably be allowed to focus on it while a low profile public-private corporation should focus instead on lunar industrialization. Otherwise we will keep getting these yo-yo space goals for NASA.
The idea of an Earth-Mars economy based on exchanging physical goods isn’t viable. But I’m looking at this from the other side. If you want to make a colony self-sufficient, or as close to that as possible, I think it will take an information-based economy (writing software is something the colonists can do and send back to Earth fairly easily) and an ability to minimize the required imports (to the point where a modest, colonial GDP can cover the cost of the inevitable imports.)
When I look at the Moon, I just see to few of the necessary resources for that. Even at the atomic level, things like carbon and nitrogen aren’t there in usable quantities, let alone things like phosphorous. You aren’t going to be growing anything in greenhouses with them, and I see that as a problem for a lunar colony. In contrast, those things are available on Mars. It would take work to extract and refine, but at least the basic ingredients are there.
True, but the amounts that are needed for lunar settlement are modest enough to make import from Earth practical. Keep in mind that once imported the Nitrogen, Carbon and Phosphorous along with water would be recycled.
High G rail guns on the Moon could make exporting refined high value products, like PGM, economic. And lunar settlers would have an advantage over Martian ones in the production of digital goods by being able to talk to their clients without a minutes long delay.
Astronauts do pretty good on ISS for six months and very much enjoy their stay there. However I notice that almost to a person they say that after six months they are really ready to come home. Six months is a long time to spend inside a sardine can almost completely cut off sensorially from life on Earth. Being cut off for six months is manageable for them, three years is a whole different level that hasn’t been tested yet.
And I think we still don’t fully understand the physical challenge of long term weightlessness even though many assume the problem has been solved. It doesn’t get reported much for some reason, but Scott Kelly said that his one year mission was much tougher psychologically than his previous five month stay on ISS, but especially physically when he returned to Earth after one year was much different than five months, he said his body did not react well even after being home for months. One night he even thought of calling the paramedics as he was experiencing some alarming symptoms. This cannot be attributed just to his being slightly older when he did the (nearly) one year stay on ISS. I think there is a lot we still need to learn about this before we commit people to nearly three years in space, even if much of that time will be spent in Martian gravity.
In spite of the challenges astronauts do enjoy their six months stay, and almost to a person say that there are three things that they really love about being on ISS – looking at Earth, which they never seem to get tired of and can spend hours doing it even after they have been in space for months. Second is weightlessness, they really love living and working in the weightless environment, they say it never gets old they just love it. And thirdly the phone calls and video chats with friends and family.
Going to Mars they will lose at least two of the three things that make living in a sardine can tolerable, viewing the Earth at close range and live communications with friends and family back home. And every time I hear mention of tethers and other forms of artificial gravity for deep space missions, I think well there goes the third one also. So they lose most if not all of the things that they most enjoy about being in space, but they have to spend quintuple or sexuple as much time in the sardine can. Yes much of that time will be spent on Mars, but that’s just in a different sardine can. With the tedium broken up by rockhounding.
These are tough people but still on ISS they can look down at Earth day or night just 250 miles away and know that if something goes wrong that within a matter of hours they will be safe on the ground. A Mars crew will have to spend almost three years knowing that they can’t go home. It would be like being in an automated prison in the middle of Siberia for three years with no warden or staff and just hoping that all of the automated equipment keeps working until your sentence is up.
That last comparison with prison I’m sure sounds bleak, but like you I think a lot of people are looking at things through Mars colored glasses. We haven’t even mentioned radiation. We have had a long time, in fact fifty years to figure a lot of this out, but we didn’t. I’m not saying we accomplished nothing, but not enough time has been spent really learning to go to Mars or anywhere deep space, if in fact that has been the goal all along we have little to show for it in comparison to the time and money spent. That cannot be wished away with dreams of seeing people on Mars in our lifetime. I love Elon Musk, he’s the eccentric genius. But I think his dreams of going to Mars will only possibly help get us to a permanent presence on the Moon and maybe even a robust space economy in LEO and the Moon in his lifetime, even though that wasn’t his intention or his dream.
I’m not saying that Musk or someone else won’t be able to pull off a one time human Mars landing within say twenty years, but only at great cost of blood sweat and tears if they are really determined to do it before we are really ready for it. I have heard all of the comparisons with the past and how people died exploring and conquering new territory. But that’s just like the high percentage of workers that used to get killed building canals, bridges and skyscrapers. We live in a different era, and that can’t be wished away either.
How do you think we’ll learn to “fully understand the physical challenge of long term weightlessness”? Or the radiation environment? You can’t obtain that sort of knowledge without huge numbers of people living in those environments.
Willingness to take risks aside, there is another aspect to those analogies to past explorations (and commerce, for that matter.) We didn’t “fully understand” the effects of dietary and vitamin deficiencies until five hundred years after Europeans started making long, trans-oceanic journeys. Adequate, empirical measures to at least mitigate the problem took about two centuries to develop. That’s experience from, what?, tens of thousands of cases? Six person-years per year (what we get from ISS and more than we’ll get from Gateway) just isn’t going to give us “full knowledge” of any medical issue.
But also, in terms of willingness to take risks, you could be right. It’s a cultural and psychological thing. It’s reasonable to say twenty-first century Americans are different from sixteenth century Spaniards. That may be the best reason to think someone else will have people on Mars (or the Moon) before the United States. There is a lot of talk about sustained effort and funding, and objectives that don’t change with every election. But the fact is, there are twenty-first century cultures who are willing to accept a 10% or 20% risk of fatal accidents. And I’m fairly sure the air in Beijing increases a resident’s risks of cancer later in life by more than 3%. The radiation from a trip to Mars just isn’t in the same league.
Not sure where I indicated that I think physical effects can be fully understood in a limited number of tests. What I don’t think is good is to seal people into a spaceship and then fling them off to Mars without having at least studied the effects of multi-year isolation in a weightless or partial gravity environment, in closer proximity to Earth. The Moon isn’t a perfect analogy for a Mars mission but spending three years on the Moon would be a pretty good one I think. Or even better several months in a space station followed by a couple of years living on the Moon and then another several months in a space station.
I may have been overreacting, but you did write, “And I think we still don’t fully understand the physical challenge of long term weightlessness even though many assume the problem has been solved.” In context, I took that to mean you thought “full understanding” was a precondition for a Mars mission. But maybe that wasn’t what you meant.
But if the knowledge isn’t going to be complete (and it can’t be, realistically), how incomplete can it be and still be “good enough”? And if there isn’t anything we can do to make it more complete, at least not within practical limits, is that a problem? (E.g. if a three year stay on the Moon by at least 50 people is required to make our knowledge sufficiently complete, and that’s a few times more expensive than an initial Mars mission, what should we do?)
Homer, Dittos. Several months to get there, several months to get back. Serious latency – several minutes- for communications. The moon is hard. Mars is orders of magnitude harder. Put people on the moon, and inspiration with everyone on this planet will flourish. The dot in the sky – not so much. The moon will reward us in many ways if we just go there to conquer it. Mars will follow, but I agree it is a near-fantasy that it will happen in our lifetimes.
It’s interesting that many of the Apollo astronauts and scientists of that era took the moon for a desolate, hopelessly dry, and uninteresting place.
Yes, I have long been struck by this as well. It’s a curious blind spot.
Thanks for the links to your essays!
It’s probably a bit of a shock when walking around everything looks the same color – shades of gray for the ground, and black for the sky. If it were me, it would probably strike me as a place I would not want to live. We have Earth, we are spoiled. Now if your whole mindset was that you were to live and work there for years, and you knew all this ahead of time, then maybe you’d get accustomed to it quickly, and then maybe be extra shocked when(if?) going back to Earth.
Not everyone is interested in being a space pioneer. Indeed, 99.99% are unlikely to be interested. But the descendants of those who settle the Moon will move on to settle the Solar System. No different than the New World where, in the 17th Century, only a few thousand a year provided the foundation for Western settlement. Frontiers are always a greater filter. Space will be no different.
It reminds me of one of Robert Heinlein’s short stories “No place like home” about a couple sent to work on the Moon who thought they hated living there until they returned to Earth and realized they could never be happy living anywhere but the Moon.?
You’d be amazed what people can get used to. My father once met a British expatriate when he was oil prospecting in the Persian Gulf. This guy had been working in the region for a couple decades. When asked if he went home often, he said, “No, not really. All that green hurts my eyes.”
I have thought about the expat analogy before. Or anyone who has moved to another continent away from friends and family and familiar surroundings for several years, or longer. But that is only part of the problem. They are still on Earth just a different part of Earth, so there is a lot still familiar, and even the unfamiliar is usually at least of interest, and there are usually a lot of other people to interact with depending on where you are. Now you could wind up in a tiny remote village in a very barren area for several years, and that would be a better approximation. But really the only close analogy is physical isolation in an enclosed space, as has been done but I don’t think for anything like three years duration at least that I am aware of. And even if that has been done the participants know that if something goes wrong there are people close by who can pull them out.
Prison or slave labor sounds harsh but I wonder if we should at least be studying that also as an imperfect analogy, to see how different people react and cope (or don’t cope) in situations where they are cut off physically from the outside world for multi-year periods of time. And yet the problem with that analogy is that in prison or slave labor the prisoners will not likely be called upon at various and sometimes unpredictable times to perform complex and technically demanding tasks. And maintain unity while living in very close proximity with a very few people. We can find examples of people who have survived amazingly tough conditions, the challenge is to find people who don’t mind these extreme conditions for multi-year periods and can function in it while having the other skills and characteristics needed to perform successfully in a complex job.
I think the assumption of many is that someone who has successfully spent six months on ISS would be the perfect candidate for going to Mars. But there’s something about that six month mark that starts to divide people, and then combined with the further isolation that would be experienced compared to a stay on ISS. I’m not sure how hard they have looked at what type of person will be suited for this very different type of mission.
Again we can find Earth analogies, but are they extreme enough? We can read about people in the past who were in similar if not identical challenging situations and who were still able to function and be productive, but it’s hard to quantify what exactly they had as characteristics and be able to use that as a criteria for selecting candidates for going to Mars. Just because someone volunteers and says they can handle it does not mean they will be able to.
I think you could use some of the Antarctic bases and some of the older, polar expeditions as a analogy. In the case of the Antarctic bases, some people winter over and never go outside all winter. That sounds like physical isolation in an enclosed space to me. It’s only for a few to six months, not years, but some people have wintered over for two consecutive winters. In most cases, help isn’t around the corner if something goes wrong. Those aren’t examples long removed from the twenty-first century. For the older, polar expeditions, you have things like the drift of the Fram. It was frozen into the arctic ice pack for three years (and, bizarrely, Fridtjof Nansen actually did that on purpose.) But you could argue that Norway in 1893 wasn’t, culturally or socially, like the United States in 2019. I wouldn’t go with prison studies because that’s an unrepresentative population and living under social conditions which wouldn’t be typical of a Mars mission (I hope; we aren’t planning on guards, gang rivalries and things like that, are we?)
An interesting question is whether or not anyone has trended the various medical or behavioral data on ISS astronauts. I assume someone must have, but don’t think I’ve seen any discussion of it. We have data for six months from a fair number of people, and for up to a year for a few. I think the real question for a Mars mission is how accurately we can project that forward to perhaps three years. So what do those curves look like? If there is a decline in something like bone density, does it level off with increased time or accelerate? That’s the sort of thing that might make us more confident that three years isn’t three times as bad as one year.
I mentioned prisons only because there are so few other analogies of people being physically isolated at various levels of isolation for uninterrupted multi-year periods, and well as it is (unfortunately) a large data pool. Yes many if not most people in prison are there because of characteristics or backgrounds not consistent with the general population, but people in prison are people and have a lot of the same characteristics as anyone else. Especially the lower security prisons for people who have not done violent crimes.
What I said might be learned is to note which ones seem to cope better than others and look for common elements, either in their personality profile, background or the prison conditions itself, and also compare the findings to the few other analogies already being looked at like people who live at Antarctic bases. I’m not saying that space researchers necessarily need to visit prisons but I would think there is a lot of data and reports available.
You make a lot of compelling arguments in your blog.
I think all the problems could be overcome, but as you stated, NASA has not done the actual work to find solutions. Well, to accurate they are doing some work, I think they are working on the VASIMR engine and they also developed a small nuclear reactor power system. Both of them are promising.
But SHOULD we even work on solutions for humans to go there because maybe it isn’t that necessary to have flesh and blood people walk in on Mars? As Malcolm said in Jurassic Park, “You were so busy figuring out how to do it, you never stopped to ask yourself if you should.”
The real question is if NASA really wants to return to the Moon. Some elements of NASA perhaps, but the agency as a whole seems to drag its feet whenever the Administration gives it the goal of a lunar return, then seems to be relieved when a new Administration says skip the Moon and aim for Mars. It seem they are just locked into the sequenced outlined in the 1950’s by Dr. von Braun, pit stop on the Moon then on to Mars!
My take on Dr. von Braun having studied him and talked to many of his co-workers was that he was disappointed and not a little shocked at how quickly the federal government turned from the moon. After that, as he watched helplessly, NASA tossed most of his German team out on the street during the big RIF at MSFC after Apollo (ironically because they weren’t veterans of the US military), and shut everything down that had to do with his pride and joy, the Saturn V. He was described as a phantom haunting the halls of NASA HQ until he gave up. Mars was a hail mary from Dr. vB, an attempt to go after another “moon,” the only one in sight but his heart was never really into it. He was smart enough to know his time had passed and very soon his physical self joined it.
As for NASA’s heart not into going back to the moon, I think that’s pretty clear. I wrote about that in my novel Back to the Moon in 1999. My belief that this was the situation was based on my work to describe a moon base in 1993 when again and again I was told I was wasting my time, that NASA would never go back to the moon, that it had almost cost the agency its life, and that we’d all best just focus on the shuttle and maybe a space station in low earth orbit. I went ahead and did the work, mostly on my own time, believing that the day would come when we would go back. Whether that day has actually arrived is TBD.
All the more reason to replace NASA with a public-private corporation focused exclusively on the economic development of the Moon. Given the background of this Administration in business, and Administrator Bridenstine in New Space, it just might be the window of opportunity to create one.
VASIMR is essentially a lab experiment. What is actually being done is nuclear thermal propulsion work in association with DARPA at MSFC which looks very promising. https://www.nasa.gov/direct…
Mike Collins is suffering from a common misapprehension. People keep forgetting we went to the Moon because we were racing the Soviet Union in space. Neil DeGrass Tyson is very clear about this when he speaks…
Without an adversary, I’m afraid we would have lost the will, especially after the Apollo Fire. The Moon is very interesting to me. Mars is crazy far away and is not hospitable. I’d rather stay close to home before we “grow up” in technology. If you have been living under a rock, check this out https://apolloinrealtime.or… has been mesmerizing me for a week now.
A “JFK Express to Mars” would repeat the worst spin-off of Apollo: short-term thinking regarding our future in space.
The 60s was a specific convergence of circumstances that made the Apollo achievement possible. It won’t happen again that way nor should it. Long-term sustained exploration & development (including Mars but encompassing the entire solar system) requires less expediency and more strategy.
And, of course, commitment.
He’ll need to wait about 30 years if he wants Mars to be next.
NASA’s management of SLS doesn’t exactly fill one with optimism.
Neither does the President’s photo op stunts.
We can do both.
It may well be that if you find yourselves having to choose one over the other, then you couldn’t afford either one of them. When this happens, it’s time to go back to the drawing board, re-examine your assumptions and try to come up with a radically cheaper architecture.
You and I are on the same page, my friend. I’m doing my best but the Mars fantasy is hard to dispel. As I’ve said, the easiest thing to do is to just go all rah-rah on Mars but I guess I’m too hardheaded. Keep fighting the good fight.
>No one wants to talk about economics and global industrial
competitiveness.
>Space should be about the purity of science
I must say science is a good sell to a point. It works well for smaller missions i.e. planetary robotic spacecraft. For larger missions of immense “industrial scale” i.e. human spaceflight are driven by political and economic interest. Sending people to Mars with science objectives has been a hard sell for past 50 years. For economic reasons, a bridge too far. Same thing for the moon, however, with it being much closer and new ways of doing things it could be made of an economic development sphere. So far the only working business model of space is communications satellites, everything else is govt subsidized.
Artemis is generally a politically driven program but not everyone is onboard like Apollo. It is not science driven otherwise we would first be sending a series of rovers to find optimum sites for further exploration of people.