This international armada of Marscraft will arrive at the red planet starting at years end and into next January.
"Next year is a crisis that may well determine whether humans to Mars occurs in our lifetime. It is a unique opportunity. But if we let it slip by we really are going to blow it," said Robert Zubrin, President of the Mars Society. He is an unabashed advocate for putting humans on the red planet, and doing it near-term.
Zubrin said interest in Mars is soon to be at its highest, also occurring at a time when the American political scene is at its most active.
Given the upcoming New Hampshire primary, "the political class is most exposed to the American public and not as well-protected by their army of consultants and astrologers who guard them from public input in Washington, D.C.," Zubrin said.
While politics and Mars probes may be in alignment, what looms large is how NASA will fare in these post-Columbia times of bureaucratic stress and technological trauma.
Face the fact
Zubrin said that the soon-to-be-issued Columbia accident report -- however it might soften its blows with kind language cant avoid the truth: the shuttle cannot be flown for much longer.
"The space program is coming immediately to a crossroads. Its going to be brought to a head by the shuttle report and what follows," Zubrin told SPACE.com.
It is now evident to anyone willing to think that were not going to be flying the shuttle to 2020 or 2030," Zubrin said. "Weve always known that it was an inefficient means of transporting crew to orbit. But now we have to face the fact that it is also no longer a safe way to do it."
NASAs pursuit of a more modest Orbital Space Plane or capsule to transport crew between Earth and the International Space Station is one response, Zubrin said.
However, a larger issue needs to be addressed, one that is critical to the future of human exploration beyond low Earth orbit, back to the Moon and onward to Mars.
Heavy lifting
A vital step is retaining the shuttle infrastructure, sans the human-carrying orbiter. By using the shuttle external tank, solid rocket motors, the shuttle main engines, and adding a new upper stage, that collective hardware can toss extremely weighty payloads into space.
Doing so results in the primary tool needed for human exploration of the Moon, Mars, as well as the near Earth asteroids, Zubrin said.
"We need to turn the shuttle into a heavy-lift vehicle and give it a goal thats worthy of a heavy-lift vehicle. And that means supporting humans being sent to either the Moon or Mars, or both," Zubrin said.
Zubrin said he does not see how the Columbia Accident Investigation Board can avoid recommending that the shuttle be replaced as the primary taxi for sending humans to orbit. The question then is whether the nation will preserve the space shuttle infrastructure or not.
In mothballing the shuttle infrastructure, so goes the human spaceflight program, Zubrin said. "The only way out is forward."
Space architect
Veteran astronaut, John Grunsfeld, told the Mars Society gathering that "Mars is going to be hard."
"In my mind, the biggest reason that we have the International Space Station is to solve some of the basic human issues before we can go to Mars," Grunsfeld said. The station has and is allowing NASA to "run the Mars experiment," in terms of learning how best to have an expeditionary crew arrive on the red planet in tip-top shape.
The finding of water on Mars "has changed everything," Grunsfeld said. The next step is to find out if there was life or life is there now, he said.
Grunsfeld said that NASA is presently grappling with a space architecture that defines the stepping stones for exploration.
"We want the exploration to be science-enabled exploration, or exploration-enabled science, either way. Its a program that, hopefully, takes us out of low Earth orbit to stay, Grunsfeld said. That architecture calls for a robotic-human partnerships that not only can build large space telescopes, but also builds the spacecraft to go onto the Moon, to Mars, and beyond, he said.
"Just the fact that we have two people living on the International Space Station is a statement that we are on the road to the red planet," Grunsfeld concluded.
Dream on
William Hartmann, a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, pointed out the difference between the old Mars and the new Mars of today. Thanks to recent spacecraft discoveries, the red planet is more like the Earth than we thought, he said.
In the past, Mars has been considered geologically and biologically dead a dry and dusty world, and any water was way back in the planets history.
"Theres been a lag to really come to grips with the new evidence," Hartmann said. "That evidence includes the fact that this dry planet actually is a very wet planet because theres lots and lots of ground ice under the ground. So Mars is a planet with a lot of water resources, you might say."
Ultimately, Hartmann said, humans are an important factor in doing the real, final geological exploration of Mars.
The discussion of humans to Mars, then permanently living on the red planet, evokes a vision and imagination that spurs people to respond and start talking about such prospects, Hartmann said.
Those gathered here at the Mars Society are exposing the raw materials that people can react to and then move to the next step, Hartmann said.
"Remember that Martin Luther King speech. He said, I have a dream. He didnt say, I have a blueprint."
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