Learn about why we should go to Mars

In May 25th 1961, John F. Jennedy - four months into his presidency - told a Joint Session of Congress: "I believe that this nation should comit itself to achieeving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth." He included reasons such as being impressive to mankind, important for the long-range space exploration. However his audiences understood his real reasons. Five weeks earlier two events had badly shaken the world's confidence in the United States: a CIA-supported invasion of Castro's Cuba had failed on the beaches at the Bay of Pigs. Also a man named Yuri Gagarin had become the first to orbit the planet. President Kennedy needed an achievement to offset these failures. His experts told him that NASA could beat the Soviets to the Moon. The birth of Project Apollo was as simple as that. However, if going to Mars is going to be NASA's long term mission, the reasons must be laid out far more clearly than that of John F. Kennedy.

One of the reasons we must go is rooted in the history of our planet. Exploration is in our genes. It is an inherited or an acquired characteristic, most people have always gone whereever they could go. Polynesians in their canoes, nomads on their camels, bushmen on foot across the Kalahari have generally been wanderers. The European forebears, especially the Portuguese, Spanish, Italians, and British were obsessed with reaching the farthest corners of the globe. Patriotism, ego, religion, inquisitiveness, greed - all played a part in helping them survive through the hard ship. All of them hoped to find a commerce route or spice which was very popular during those times. There won't be any commerce route or spice waiting for us on Mats. However the urge to go, to see, to touch, to smell, to learn - that is the essence of it, not to mention the exhilarating possibility of emcountering something totally unexpected.

$24 billion was spent on the Apollo program, however not all that money was spent in ourter space. The money were spent in the United States on high-technology jobs that helped make from high-tech gadgets to running shoes. Clothing and equipment of fire-fighters were largely due to Apollo program's discoveries. NASA claims that medical devices deriving from the space program has saved lives and have had a total economic impact of $1.8 billion since 1973. Benefits were possible because of work NASA has done in computers, microelectronic, electrical power, intertial systems, computational fluid dyanmics, and thermal control. Their discoveries have helped other nations to enter the space era. The French have made Ariane booster that has put up satelites very sucessfully proving their technological advance. THe Soviets introduced the Proton to the world market at a bargain-basement prices. Probally the most ominous, the Japanese are preparing to enter the fray after years of meticulous preparation. Space exploration has joined the nations together in a way that they are competative and united.

There is also a scientific bonanza waiting on Mars. Scientists call it comparative planetology. They would like to study the history of the Solar System and the evolution of the planets by comparing evidence found on Earth, the Moon, and Mars. The history of Earth's climate, for example, can be partially decoded by examining ice tubes bored from the Antarctic crust. It would be extraordinarily helpful to be able to compare these with ice bored from the Martian poles. Today Earth's atmosphere seems susceptible to ozone holes, particularly a large on near the South Pole. Scientist wonder whether Mars shows similar evidence of such occurance. They also ask other questions such as how recent is the volcanism on Mars? What caused it to stop? What happened to all the water that carved out deep channels? Could a similar process occur on Eath? What caused these two planets, similar in so many ways, to evolve so differently? Is there life on Mars? To scientists these questions are fundamental to a better understading of our own planet.

For more than a hundred years we have debated the theory of Malthusian expansions, and more recently the Club of Rome has attempted to define some limits to growth. On Earth the supply of food has always lagged begind the production of new human beings, but Mars cannot be counted on to alter this pattern, either by supplying resources to Earth or by siphoning off Earth's excess population. The distance is too vast, the cost too high. But living in close quarters under a dome, squandering nothing, recycling products to the maximum, Martian colonists may very well find new antidotes to Malthusian pressure. The new Martian settlers will have a fresh start. They would be a close-knit, cohesive group. They will have no indigenous diseases, no traditional enemies, no borders, no lack of real estate, no accumulated wealth, and a common necessity to struggle against the harsh envrionment, Martian settlers will not have a lot of the excess baggage that impedes friendly relations among Earthlings. They will have a fresh start, these people of the Earth but not on the Earth.

Mars is also a great place to test our behavior. As Carl Sagan has written, "The U.S and the U.S.S.R have now booby-trapped the planet with nearly 60,000 nuclear weapons." There would be no need to carry weapons to lifeless Mars, and it would be easy to prevent their transport from Earth. Therefore, for a while anyway, a modern society would be totally without them. What could we Earthlings learn from this? How would Martian disputes be settled? Escaping from deadly nuclear weapons is not a valid reason for leaving Earth, however to learn to live without them and to study human behavior where no weapons are present may be a valid reason.

NASA needs a new place, Mars. It's not just the money that NASA needs, it's having a goal, a unifying vision for the future. Instead of attempting to make it be all things to all users, the station's designers would tailor it to the needs of a Mars mission: a place to test concepts, people and hardware. In a climate of healthy expansion, a Mars project would build not just Mars hardware but a creativity and enthusiasm that would spread to all facets of the space agency's work. For exmple, during the peak Apollo years, support for the space sicneces was also robust, and some of the most productive unmanned flights were lauched along with the Apollo missions. A Mars rocket would pull along an assortment of other ideas and projects in its wake.

Planets are all we have left to explore, in a physical sense, except for a bit of roaming on the sea bottom. Only the inner planets are accessible now. Mercury and Venus are impossibly hot, and we have already done the Moon. Therefore, if we have a spiritual need for a new frontier, Mars it it. If there is a migratory drive within us, it will lead us to Mars. If there is an extraterrestrial imperative, Mars is surely the next logical stepping-stone on the endless journery to the stars. Our bodies are no more than star stuff that coalesced along with the Earth, debris from the original explosion (big bang) that created everything we know. We won't stay here. Call it genes, character, culture, spirit, ethos, it is within us to look up into the night sky and be curious within us to comiit our bodies to following our eyes. As T.S Eliot said: "We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.