SpaceX is developing its first Mars missions with NASA, space experts

Elon
Musk and a SpaceX illustration of its Big Falcon Spaceship on
Mars.
SpaceX; Kevork Djansezian/Getty;
Shayanne Gal/Business Insider

• SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk, is building a
  rocket-and-spaceship system to land people on Mars.
• Musk said he wants to launch the first humans to
  Mars in 2024, following an uncrewed
  mission in 2022.
• As Ars Technica reported,
  SpaceX held a private “Mars Workshop” with NASA and other experts to draft plans for
  its Mars landings.
• Experts say setting up a viable outpost, let alone a
  colony, on Mars is more
  daunting than Musk has let on.

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SpaceX, the aerospace company founded by Elon Musk, held a
hush-hush conference in Colorado this week to formulate a plan
for
landing people on Mars and building an outpost.

The inaugural “Mars Workshop,” first reported by Eric Berger at Ars
Technica, happened Tuesday and Wednesday in Boulder, Colorado.

SpaceX reportedly sent invitations to about 60 scientists and
engineers, asking them not to publicize the event or their
attendance at the workshop. Leaders of NASA’s Mars exploration
program reportedly attended, but the agency did not answer
Business Insider’s questions about who from its staff was there.

Workshop attendees were asked to participate in “active
discussions regarding what will be needed to make such missions
happen,” according to Ars Technica.

According to Ars Technica, the workshop may be “the first meeting
of such magnitude” in SpaceX’s quest to land humans on and
ultimately colonize the red planet.
(Though a SpaceX representative told Business Insider in an
email, “we regularly meet with a variety of experts concerning
our missions to Mars.”)

It’s about time for these discussions, especially if Musk wants
to meet his “aspirational” timeline to launch the first human
crew toward Mars in the mid-2020s.

“We already have the technology to build rockets and land
vehicles on Mars. We’ve been doing that for decades,” D. Marshall Porterfield, the
former director of NASA’s Space Life and Physical Sciences
Division, told Business Insider. “The main hindrance is the human
factor. If you really are going to land a person on Mars, you
have to feed them, keep them healthy, and build them habitats.”

What we know about SpaceX’s Mars mission plans

SpaceX/Twitter

Musk launched SpaceX in 2002 in part because he was frustrated
that NASA didn’t have any actionable plan to land people on Mars.

Ever since, his company has been building
larger and more
cost-effective rockets, accruing
staff and
cash, and working toward the ultimate goal of colonizing
Mars.

Musk first presented an outline for reaching Mars in
September 2016, then elaborated on it in
October 2017. The plan called for an enormous, fully reusable
spaceflight system called the
Big Falcon Rocket, or BFR. The
35-story-tall system would have two main parts — a giant
spaceship atop a gargantuan booster — and be able to carry up to
100 people to Mars.

SpaceX plans to launch an uncrewed mission to Mars in 2022,
followed by the first human explorers in 2024 — a timeline

Musk said he felt “pretty optimistic” about at the 2018 South
by Southwest festival. He also elaborated on the idea of setting
up a permanent Martian colony.

“It will start off building just the most elementary
infrastructure, just a base to create some propellant, a power
station, blast domes in which to grow crops — all of the sort of
fundamentals without which you cannot survive,” Musk said. “And
then really there’s going to be an explosion of entrepreneurial
opportunity because Mars will need everything from iron foundries
to pizza joints. I think Mars should really have great bars: the
Mars Bar.”

A diagram showing how
SpaceX plans to establish a base and methane-fueling depot on
Mars.

Elon Musk/SpaceX;
New Space/Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.
Publishers

Long before trying to colonize Mars, SpaceX will need to pull off
its first landings there. Each will require about half a dozen
BFR flights to get a spaceship into low-Earth orbit and refuel
it.

Construction of a prototype spaceship for the BFR system is
now underway and may be test-launched as soon as mid-2019. Even
if that effort goes well, SpaceX will still need to secure scores
of durable supplies and high-tech equipment — and formulate
well-laid plans to use it all.

Workshops with top experts in the spaceflight world could help
SpaceX work toward those goals.

Why SpaceX needs a great plan — and likely lots of help — to
reach the red planet

The
spacesuit and Crew Dragon spaceship that SpaceX will use to
launch NASA astronauts into space.

SpaceX

To pull off its initial Mars plans and seed an
off-world economy, SpaceX will likely need tens of billions
or hundreds of billions of dollars.

SpaceX was awarded about $3 billion in US government awards and
contracts to develop its Falcon 9 rocket and
Crew Dragon spaceship, with much of that spent to meet NASA’s

exacting specifications for
flying astronauts. But a Mars mission is far more ambitious —
and dangerous.

Musk has not been shy about the
high risk of failure. In 2016
he said “the likelihood of death is very high” for the first
Mars missions, and for that reason he probably wouldn’t fly there
himself.

“Being unafraid to fail has really been what’s helped SpaceX
advance so quickly,” Steve Nutt, an aerospace and mechanical engineer
at University of Southern California, told Business Insider.
“Historically, engineers have learned more from their failures
than they have their successes. By far.”

Still, multilateral support from space agencies and aerospace
companies won’t come easy; SpaceX will need a very detailed
proposal that doesn’t sound like a suicide mission.

How, exactly, Mars missions would play out and which technologies
would be used to
keep people alive on the red planet have yet to be described
publicly by the company or shared with Business Insider. (We’ve
asked SpaceX and Musk, to no avail.)

“They seem to have tackled a huge aspect of it — the rockets, the
propulsion, the landing,” Ray Wheeler, an advanced life support
researcher at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center who wasn’t invited to
SpaceX’s Mars workshop, told Business Insider. “But having an
efficient and appropriate habitat for the human, reliable
life-support systems, the right spacesuits, and so on? That all
demonstrates the complexity of this whole idea.”

Porterfield said he admires SpaceX’s
reusable rockets and
growing disruption of the rocket-launch industry. But he said
that as late as 2016, before Porterfield left NASA to become a
professor at Purdue University, SpaceX had “moderate to minimal”
interaction with the agency about how to keep people alive in
space.

The “Mars Workshop” conference may be SpaceX’s first major
attempt to discuss “the elephants in the room,” he said.
Porterfield acknowledged that few people know what SpaceX’s
6,000-plus employees are doing, but said that from his recent
perspective on the outside, it seems the company has until now
not given much thought to deep-space crew survival and mission
planning.

“All the contact I’ve had was with aerospace engineers and rocket
people,” Porterfield said of NASA’s communication with SpaceX in
previous years. “I didn’t see any life support or human health
and medicine people.”

The problem of surviving a mission to Mars

Elon
Musk/SpaceX

The main hurdles to existing on Mars — having enough food, air,
and water — are not surprising, but that doesn’t make them any
less daunting.

Mars is an average of 140 million miles from Earth. The two
planets line up in their orbits about once every two years, which
shortens a yearslong trip between Earth and Mars to six or nine
months.

“In a baseline Mars mission, if you go to the surface, you have
to stay there. It’s a three-year mission. You have to wait on the
surface before the planets realign,” Wheeler said.

By comparison, Apollo
missions to the moon took about a week. Missions to the
International Space Station can last months, but it can be
resupplied with relative ease at 250 miles away.

Porterfield said that the food alone required to feed a ragtag
Mars mission crew would amount to 10 tons, based on previous NASA
planning. One possible solution to that weight challenge would be
to predeliver food supplies years in advance, but that could lead
to health problems. Vitamin C, for example, degrades fairly
rapidly, so deep-space astronauts might risk developing scurvy.

Water is also very heavy, as are the filters and machinery needed
to scrub poisonous carbon dioxide from a spaceship or
Mars habitat.

“I don’t now if they’ve assumed all this other stuff is less
complex, or if it’s already available, or NASA or other space
agencies are already doing this,” Wheeler said of multiple
technologies SpaceX will need to pull off a Mars outpost. “Those
might be incorrect or somewhat incorrect assumptions.”

A technology called
bioregenerative life support, which Wheeler has worked on for
decades, could help alleviate or even solve these issues.

The concept is to use biology — an ecosystem of microbes, plants,
and even small animals — to scrub carbon dioxide from the air,
regenerate oxygen, break down waste, and grow food. A small
system could provide productive activities for long, cramped
missions (such as gardening) and vital nutrition, Wheeler said. A
larger system might constantly supply most of the crew’s air and
food, negating the need for resupply missions every couple of
years.

“We’re really talking about technology that replaces what the
Earth does,” Porterfield said. “This is our current
bioregenerative life-support system.”

Inside
a simulated space cabin in which students live as a part of the
Lunar Palace 365 Project, at Beihang University in
Beijing.
Damir
Sagolj/Reuters

But prototypes of this technology, such as China’s
Lunar Palace-1 experiment, are very heavy,
energy-inefficient, and far from a ready-to-launch state. NASA
had plans to do similar experiments, but President George W.
Bush’s administration defunded those projects in 2004, and
funding for related work has been scarce or nonexistent since.

Keeping the
human body healthy in space is another challenge that
Porterfield said SpaceX needs to figure out. Floating in
microgravity causes bones to weaken and muscles to atrophy, among
other physiological problems. Deep-space
radiation could be a
big problem, so developing effective shielding is necessary.
It also leads to body-wide
genetic changes that researchers are just barely beginning to
detect, let alone understand.

The longest time any person has consecutively lived in space is

about a year — not three — and the longest mock mission to
Mars lasted about 500 days. (The crew
got extremely bored.)

“We really don’t have a lot of data on what happens to a human in
microgravity beyond a year,” Porterfield said.

Despite his worries, Porterfield said he’s excited that SpaceX is
holding a workshop (and likely more in the future) to tackle the
company’s greatest challenges yet with some of the world’s
leading experts.

He’s even hopeful that SpaceX — pending “substantial” investments
in funding and staff — might pull off a viable crewed Mars
mission within a couple years of Musk’s 2024 target.

“They’re not hindered by politics or government bureaucracy,” he
said. “They’re capable of being much more nimble than NASA.”