MOSCOW -- Sending humans to Mars with return tickets is technically and medically possible, but Russia cannot muster up the funds and resources necessary for such a costly program on its own, officials and experts said.
"There are no obstacles that cannot be overcome from the medical point of view. Problems exist, but there are approaches toward solving them," Anatoly Grigoryev, director of the Moscow-based Institute for Biomedical Problems, told SPACE.com.
In a statement issued to SPACE.com on Thursday through his press service, Grigoryev noted that Russia has already acquired expertise in keeping human beings in space long enough for a voyage to Mars and back.
He cited the example of the deputy director of his institute, Valery Polyakov, who spent 438 days on the Mir space station in 1994-95 to prove that human beings can endure over yearlong voyages in space. Calls to Polyakov were unanswered Thursday.
Mars 2016?
Grigoryev said the year 2016 offers the best launch window to take advantage of a favorable planetary alignment between Earth and Mars, but would not venture a guess as to whether Russia's space industry could muster the safe technology needed to send a crew of cosmonauts to Mars and back by that date.
NASA chief Dan Goldin told a symposium on the 40-year history of U.S. human spaceflight on Tuesday that human beings could reach the Red Planet 20 years from now.
According to an official at the Russian Aviation and Space Agency (Rosaviakosmos), America, the world's wealthiest country, has the resources and ability to launch a manned craft to Mars in two decades, unlike Russia, whose annual national budget roughly equals that of California.
"We don't even try to estimate how much it would cost" Russia to launch a manned mission to Mars, an official who oversees Rosaviakosmos' Mars probe program, told SPACE.com in a phone interview Thursday.
Presently, the cash-strapped agency isn't even sure whether it will be able to launch
in 2005 on a sample-return mission that will also transmit images of their surfaces, as had been earlier planned, according to the official, who asked not to be named. The agency's Mars exploration program already saw one Mars-bound probe plummet back into the ocean when its launch vehicle failed in 1996.
While unable to solely finance the launch of a crew to Mars, with return tickets, Russia could shoulder some costs of U.S.-led program along with Europe, the Rosaviakosmos official said.
"We could have lowered the overall costs as cheaper, but skilled labor would remain our advantage, hopefully, even 20 years from now," said the official. As for Russia's edge on keeping human beings safe and sound in space for years, it will have evaporated by 2020, he said.
"Twenty years is more than enough for Americans to muster these technologies thanks to ISS (the International Space Station)," said the official.
Another Rosaviakosmos official, when reached by phone Thursday, questioned the very need to launch humans to Mars.
"The question is what such a mission can exactly achieve. I don't see anything that would justify the costs that would total tens of billions of dollars," said the official, who asked not to be named.
He said the federal government would have to boost Rosaviakosmos' 2001 budget of 4.59 billion rubles by 50 times if Russia were to try to send its cosmonauts to Mars in 2016.
Such an interplanetary hike is "unreal" and, thus, Rosaviakosmos should limit its Mars exploration program to trying to send a robotic probe there in the next several years, he said.
Technically feasible, financially impossible
A Russian space industry veteran said the launch of a manned craft to Mars is technically and medically feasible, but would prove to be too costly.
Konstantin Feoktistov, who helped to prepare
advertisement
