The Best Australian Science Writing 2015

by Heidi Norman

  Global unity is the goal? I ask.

  ‘To be honest, for me it’s not an important part of the program. For me it’s just about the goal of getting this done,’ he says, confusingly. ‘For me personally, it’s really about building the next base for humans to go to. For me it’s more the technology challenge and the building challenge than the actual big picture.’

  I ask how he sees Mars One being able to launch for such a comparatively small budget.

  ‘That’s a question I get a lot. One reason is that the space agencies have become too risk-averse. It’s not at all allowed for anything to go wrong, which takes a lot of paperwork to ensure. While we think having a little bit higher risk with the mission is very acceptable and will reduce costs significantly.’

  This makes Mars One sound like some kind of intergalactic Uber. If checks and balances are too expensive, do away with them. If people might die in the course of your mission, have them sign a waiver. NASA, the European Space Agency, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency or any other government body can’t afford the same laxity, and they certainly can’t send their citizens one-way into space with no way to retrieve them.

  Mars One lists SpaceX on its suppliers page, but SpaceX replied over email that it has no current contracts with Mars One, adding that it is always open to future contracts with interested parties. The contracts Mars One does have are with Lockheed Martin, which is undertaking a feasibility study for an unmanned craft based on their 2008 Phoenix lander. But that study can’t be completed until it receives the payload specifications from Mars One – specifications Mars One recently put out a call to universities to provide. Lockheed Martin confirmed that it is waiting to receive these specs. Yet the lander is slated to fly, according to Mars One, in 2018. There is also a suit concept study under way – the first step in developing a prototype for what the colonists would spend their time outside wearing – with Paragon Space Development Corporation. A representative of Paragon responded, ‘We appreciate the challenging work Mars One have contracted Paragon to perform, and we look forward to a long and growing working relationship as the cadence of their program advances.’

  Another contract Mars One has in place is for a reality television show with a company owned by Endemol, which produced Big Brother. The deal was announced in a joint-company press release, but when asked for comment Endemol wouldn’t confirm if the contract was for a pilot or a full series. Their PR director wrote, ‘Things are at a very early stage and we’re not yet in a position to add anything further to what was detailed in the press release.’

  A reality television series is the lynchpin of Mars One’s plan. It is through this that it intends to raise the necessary capital to fund the mission, via advertising revenue and broadcast rights. The proposal is to film the final candidates 24/7 for the duration of their ten-year training mission on Earth, from the selection process to lift-off, and then to continue to broadcast the mission, live, beamed in perpetuity back from Mars to viewers on Earth.

  There is currently no network buyer for the show.

  For the rights to advertise and screen this Survivor in space, Mars One estimates revenues in upwards of US$8 billion, basing this on the most recent Olympic Games revenues. With this money, Mars One will be able to purchase technologies that, in ten years’ time, companies like SpaceX will have perfected. There is the small problem of not having the money until you have the show, and not having the show until you have the technology, and not having the technology until you have the money, and possibly not having the technology in time, or ever, which is why, Mars One says on its website, the schedule is flexible.

  A version of a Mars mission suspiciously close to what Mars One is proposing can be found in The Journal of Cosmology, a controversial periodical edited by Rhawn Joseph. Joseph is probably best known for filing a lawsuit against NASA, for allegedly failing to investigate an object on the surface of Mars discovered by the Curiosity rover. He contended that the object could have been a living organism. It turned out to be a rock.

  In 2010, Joseph wrote ‘Marketing Mars: Financing the Human Mission to Mars and the Colonization of the Red Planet’. The biggest revenue stream in his plan is a reality television series that would film every minute of the training and mission and send it out to the world: a combination of the Super Bowl, the Olympics, Star Wars, Big Brother and Survivor, with a little Running Man. Reading his plan, I began to wonder if viewers would place bets on the astronauts: Will they survive surface entry? Who will suffer a psychotic break? How many days will their food supplies last? Can they repair the oxygen-recycle system before they asphyxiate?

  Joseph claims that the company stole his Mars financing plan, and says his intellectual property is being used to fleece vulnerable people ‘when in fact Mars One is nothing more than a website’. Lansdorp denies that Mars One took the idea from Joseph, and says that Mary Roach’s 2010 book Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void was their inspiration. Joseph resisted my requests to interview him, but emailed, ‘Fraudsters like Mars One emerge from beneath rocks all the time. That’s just the way it is.’

  Commander Chris Hadfield might be known to you as the guy on the International Space Station who went viral singing David Bowie, or as the guy who heroically handled going temporarily blind on a space walk when chemicals from a puncture in his suit made their way into his eyes. ‘There’s a great, I don’t know, self-defeating optimism in the way that this project has been set up,’ he says, over the phone. He speaks in the manner of someone breezily adept at explaining complex ideas. ‘I fear that it’s going to be a little disillusioning for people, because it’s presented as if for sure it’s going to happen. They’re choosing crews. [But] going to Mars is hard. As John Young, one of the most accomplished astronauts in history, said, “Mars is a lot further away than almost everybody thinks. Both physically and in time.”’

  Hadfield says that Mars One fails at even the most basic starting point of any manned space mission: if there are no specifications for the craft that will carry the crew, you can’t begin to select the people who will be living and working inside of it. ‘I really counsel every single one of the people who are interested in Mars One … to start asking the hard questions now. I want to see the technical specifications of the vehicle orbiting Earth. I want to know: how does a space suit work on Mars? Show me how it is pressurised and how it is cooled. What’s the glove design? None of that stuff can be bought off the rack. It does not exist.’

  Hadfield is not someone in the habit of crushing people’s dreams. He remembers vividly being nine years old and watching Neil Armstrong step off the Apollo lander, and from then on fine-tuning every aspect of his life to maximise his chances of going into space – which he achieved 26 years later at the age of 35.

  ‘Thirteen years ago we started living on the space station, so we basically started colonising space. The next steps out were the Moon, asteroids and then eventually Mars. We absolutely need to do it on the Moon for a few generations, learn how to do all of those things – how do you completely recycle your water? How do you completely recycle your oxygen? How do you protect yourselves from radiation? How do you not go crazy? How do you set up the politics of the place and the command structure, so that when we get it wrong we won’t all die? It’s not a race, it’s not an entertainment event. We didn’t explore the world to entertain other people. We did it as a natural extension of human curiosity. And that’s what will continue to drive us.’

  His doubts were reinforced when, at the 65th International Astronautical Congress in Toronto, four MIT PhD students presented a 35-page paper on the technical feasibility of Mars One’s plan. The students concluded that (among many, many concerns) the oxygen required to grow crops would quickly rise to deadly levels, producing almost 100 per cent humidity, requiring venting via as yet non-existent technology that would separate nitrogen and oxygen; the habitat would soon become a serious fire hazard and the colonists would likely asphyxiate a
s a result.

  The first fatality would occur 68 days after landing.

  * * * * *

  CEO Bas Lansdorp is vague on the details of Mars One’s financial status.

  On its site, Mars One sells merchandise and lists a page of ‘silver sponsors’, which include a science blog, a Dutch film company, a translation agency, a consumer electronics retailer, and an open-source 3D-printing software provider. On contacting one of these, I learned that the cost of becoming a silver sponsor is less than $10 000, but my source would not say exactly how much. Mars One is also casting around for designers willing to make online advertising in return for merchandise (including a mug). It lists a tally of donations, split into countries, all the way down to Bosnia and Herzegovina’s $1 pledge. The total, at the time of publication, was US$784 380. That’s just over 0.01 per cent of the $6 billion mission price tag.

  ‘Right now Mars One is receiving funding from investors, donations from all over the world, and small corporate sponsors are helping us. We’re in negotiation with a few very large brands,’ says Lansdorp. But he won’t talk specifics about which brands or what their investment would be. He says the company has the funds available for the unmanned lander feasibility study and the suit study currently under way.

  Then there’s the company’s claim that 200 000 people applied for a one-way ticket. This statistic, issued by Mars One’s press office, was picked up with credulous haste by news outlets around the world. Even religious leaders made their opinions known, with the UAE-based General Authority of Islamic Affairs and Endowment forbidding Muslims from applying, as to leave the sanctity of Earth forever would be an affront to Allah.

  But Norbert Kraft has told The Guardian he was sorting through 80 000 applicants, not 200 000. NBC News tallied the number of video applicants on the Mars One website and came to 2782, each of whom paid an application fee of between $5 and $75. I ask Lansdorp where the 200 000 people registered their interest and if this list was ever made public. His answer is … complicated.

  ‘I don’t know if that was ever made public, but they have registered on our website,’ he says. ‘Then there was a number of steps where people had the opportunity to drop out. The application process was kind of a self-selection that avoided us having to review all of them. The first step was the application fee. A number dropped out there. Then there was a video you had to make and questions you had to answer. And that’s also where a lot dropped out.’

  I ask if in the course of fact-checking this story he will allow me to see the full list of applicants to verify the number.

  ‘Of course we cannot share the details of the applicants with you because that’s confidential, private information.’

  I offer to allow the names to be redacted.

  ‘Ah, no. I’m not interested in sharing that information with you.’ He emails later, with an invitation to come at my own expense to Mars One’s office in the Netherlands and see the list in person, though cameras will not be allowed, and he will need to see my article before publication.

  I tell him that of course that won’t be possible.

  * * * * *

  Why?

  What could possibly drive someone to leave Earth to die on a barren rock in the frozen depths of space? What tangible good would come from us spending tens – even hundreds – of billions of dollars on sending a tiny group of people to live 18th-century lives there? Could we not find more effective ways to spend that money here if the ultimate goal is protecting the future of the human race?

  I’ve now been working on this story for more than a year, and I’ve interviewed people at government space agencies who are literal geniuses. I’ve come away in awe of people at NASA, with an appreciation of why space exploration is so damn expensive: because it is incredibly difficult and incredibly dangerous. Bas Lansdorp had told me it’s ‘just about getting this done’. To damn the consequences – both the life-or-death consequences space flight presents and the personal consequences for anyone pinning their Mars-bound hopes on a fantastical, responsibility-free project – for me, ethically and morally this is an unacceptable proposition.

  Yet what really drives this enterprise is the ancient, unbearable anxiety of death. Building a colonial outpost on Mars is a quest for immortality – for those who succeed, it’s the chance to live on in human history; for humanity, it’s the chance to stave off the inevitable death of our species, at least among those who believe we can upload human consciousness to a frequency sent out into space, or just recreate our unlikely habitat on another planet that happens to be next to ours.

  Walking on the beach that day with Josh, I thought of something I once read online, a ‘timeline of the far future’, postulating a collection of speculative theories about life and the universe beyond our comprehension of time. When I reached the end I had suffered a panic attack of such intensity the walls of the room appeared distended, and I momentarily lost my hearing. Then I lay on the floor of my office and cried for a very long time.

  * * * * *

  If you are ever standing in the narrow path of the shadow of a total solar eclipse, when the moon passes between Earth and the sun in a configuration known as syzygy, you will see the stunning effect of the sun’s corona flaring from behind the moon in broad daylight, as the circumference of the moon fits precisely inside the circumference of the sun from our terrestrial perspective.

  This happens only because the sun’s distance from Earth is roughly 400 times the moon’s distance, and the sun’s diameter is 400 times that of the moon: an almost exact ratio.

  The odds of this configuration occurring anywhere in the universe, least of all at a place and time in which intelligent, self-aware life is present to observe it, are so minuscule as to be incalculable.

  Six hundred million years from now, Earth’s tides will have pushed the moon too far away from the planet for total solar eclipses to be possible.

  If human life were to disappear from Earth tomorrow, it is estimated that it would take the planet only 100 million years tocompletely reclaim the surface, leaving no trace of proof that intelligent beings ever existed. All the satellites orbiting the planet will, untended, fall, many coming to rest at the bottom of the sea.

  In 7.6 million years’ time, Mars’ moon Phobos will have come close enough to the planet’s surface to be destroyed by gravity and torn into a ring that will orbit Mars for three million years, after which the debris will smash into the face of our best hope for repopulating the solar system.

  Five billion years from now, our sun will enter its red giant phase and expand to at least 200 times its current size, enveloping Mercury, Venus and quite possibly Earth.

  One hundred trillion years from now, all the hydrogen of the universe will be exhausted so all remaining stars will die. In one hundred vigintillion years, quantum tunnelling will turn all matter left in the universe into liquid. In 10^10^120 years (in numbers too big for our minds to grasp, zeros are added in septillions), our universe will experience its heat death, encountering maximum entropy when there is no longer enough thermodynamic free energy to sustain processes that consume energy – like life.

  By this point, time will have ceased to exist.

  You can right now, if you like, float gently and lovingly over Earth and take in the view from the International Space Station. Anyone with an internet connection can get a lo-fi insight into what astronauts call the Overview Effect, the feeling of seeing the majesty of Earth from space and trying to take in the enormity of it and the tiny, unlikeliness of yourself.

  You may find it pleasantly reassuring.

  * * * * *

  I know that I will have to tell Josh about this: that from everything I can find, Mars One doesn’t appear in any way qualified to carry off the biggest, most complex, audacious and dangerous exploration mission in human history. They don’t have the money to do it. Summoning all the good faith I can muster, I wouldn’t classify it as a scam, exactly – but it does seem an amazingly hubristic fantasy
: an absolute faith in the free market, in technology, in the media and in money, to be able to do what thousands of highly qualified people in government agencies have so far not yet been able to do over decades of diligently trying, making slow headway through individually hard-won breakthroughs, working in relative anonymity. I will have to tell Josh that he shouldn’t look to a theoretical future while his chance to be actually present in the privilege of human life passes him by; that he shouldn’t give up on the hard work of making a life with the rest of us here on this horrendously messy, imperfect, unimaginably fragile and steadily warming Earth.

  Late in the day, Josh and I are sitting across from each other, sunk in deep sofas that make us both look small. I ask Josh how he would feel if he made it through to selection, but Mars One didn’t happen.

  ‘Disappointed,’ he says quietly after a long moment. ‘Disappointed. But in the grand scheme of things, it’s already done.’

  For someone like Josh, it is a quest for true purpose, for belonging; a burning wish to be exceptional. ‘It’s given me direction. It’s given thousands of people direction.’

  As I raise some of the most insurmountable problems with the mission – the lack of money, the lack of contracts, the fact that the selection panel isn’t public – the rational Josh emerges. When I say that Chris Hadfield has serious reservations about Mars One, he isn’t surprised; other astronauts have also expressed their scepticism. Especially that one he has always looked up to: Andy Thomas. ‘He hates it,’ Josh says. ‘Absolutely hates it.’

  Josh knows on some level that what Mars One is proposing is unlikely to come off. At least not in the time frame and budget it has set. But it’s that most minute, most remote chance it could actually work that keeps Josh holding on. That brought him home to Perth and away from a girl he loved, to dedicate all his energies to Mars One.

  ‘It’s Joseph Campbell’s Hero With a Thousand Faces,’ he says, leaning forward. ‘Except you stay in the hall of heroes; you don’t return with the boon. You’re staying out there on the adventure, calling others to come.