Mission to Mars
...gestion and their bone and muscle loss. Nowadays, after a long duration flights, Soviet cosmonauts are unable to stand or walk when they return to Earth (The International). Landing on Mars would be another dangerous maneuver, but not as dangerous as surviving on Mars. In fact, astronauts not only would have to face radiations, even though the Martian atmosphere would partially protect them, and a low gravity environment (about 1/3 of Earth’s gravity), for six to eighteen months, but they would also have to produce everything “on site”, oxygen, water, food and energy, since it is technically impossible to carry along everything needed. This would create a whole range of survival problems from growing food in greenhouse-like ‘bubbles”, to extracting water and oxygen from ice, assuming that there is ice on Mars (Kluger 47). But assuming that nothing goes wrong from the technical point of view, nobody can predict how the astronauts will react from a psychological prospective. They would be forced to live in close contact with fellow crew members, isolated from their own world, far away from their friend and family for years all the while fully aware that if something went wrong there would be no rescue possible. The cost of the Mars Program would be enormous. In 1989 NASA estimated it around $400 billion, about $600 billion today (Easterbrook 51). Sending humans to Mars is simply too expensive, considering what could be done here on Earth with the same amount of money. Someone suggested that the mission would pay for itself because Mars is full of natural resources, but extracting those resources or transporting them back to Earth, not to mention the technical difficulties of turning the Red Planet into a mining site would cost billions of dollars. In order to fund the Mars Program NASA would have to ground the space shuttle for good, cancel the mission to fix Hubble and essentially back out of the International Space Station (Kluger 44) Experts maintain that human space flights have become too expensive. Norman Augustine, retired chairman of Lockheed Martin Corp said, "It would be a grave mistake to undertake a major new space objective on the cheap. To do so, in my opinion, would be an invitation to disaster," (Expert). Iowa physicist James Van Allen, one of the founding fathers of space exploration, argues that “such manned missions have become too costly -- and that better results could be gained by using robotic spacecraft.” He says people must have the courage to say, Let's terminate human spaceflight." (Famed). Why should we go to Mar...