NASA recently released a report entitled “Journey to Mars: Pioneering the Next Steps in Space Exploration”, in which they outlined the goals of a manned mission to Mars and how they will get there. The engineers are taking planetary protection very seriously and using different cleaning methods to avoid any mishaps.
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According to MIT aeronautics and astronautics professor Olivier de Weck, a vehicle carrying astronauts could make a detour to the lunar surface, where it could use fuel that was created from soil and water ice mined from craters there.
After the glorious Apollo missions that led humans to the Moon for the first time, it’s time for a new Golden Age of space exploration – and NASA has a solid plan for that.
During the in-situ resource utilization approach, materials ordinarily carried into space from Earth would be replaced by those produced in space, MIT explained. Now, researchers have found that to save on weight, a detour to the moon is the best route to Mars.
However, as humans explore beyond Earth’s orbit, such strategies may not be sustainable, as de Weck and Ishimatsu write: “As budgets are constrained and destinations are far away from home, a well-planned logistics strategy becomes imperative”.
“There’s a pretty high degree of confidence that these resources are available”, de Weck says. “Almost nobody has looked at that question”.
Based on their calculations, they determined the optimal route to Mars, in order to minimise the mass that would have to be launched from Earth – often a major cost driver in space exploration missions. The originator of the Moon refuelling plan is MIT researcher Takuto Ishimatsu, who has contributed to a host of papers on the various ways to get humanity into space.
The model assumes a future scenario in which fuel can be processed on, and transported from, the moon to rendezvous points in space. Making a rocket capable of generating its own fuel, and looking at the bodies in the solar system (and the points between them) as the building blocks of a network instead of single destinations, might be the first step to maintaining a population in space, instead of sending people up briefly and temporarily.
It is found that a strategy utilizing lunar resources in the cislunar network may improve overall launch mass to low Earth orbit for recurring missions to Mars compared to NASA’s Mars Design Reference Architecture 5.0, even when including the mass of the ISRU infrastructures that need to be pre-deployed.
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With The Martian packing out cinemas and scientists finding strong evidence of flowing water on the surface of Mars, interest in the Red Planet has never been greater.
