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Finish the Space Station, Head for Mars

By Richard Wassersug

There has never been an international civil engineering fiasco quite like the International Space Station (ISS). Its estimated total cost of $95 billion is almost 10 times what it would take to build the Panama Canal today, yet its end is nowhere in sight. The ISS was scheduled to be completed by 2000, but its projected completion has slipped to 2006 and may slip further. NASA friends and foes alike are asking: What will it take to finish the project?

The scientists who can make the best use of the ISS are biologists like myself - a space biologist with experiments to fly on the completed ISS - who are interested in the long-term effects of microgravity on living organisms. For us the ISS as originally planned was going to be - and could still be - a stellar laboratory for studying the growth and development of organisms in space through several generations. The sort of work that we do is fundamental to determining how dangerous extended space flight is for living organisms and how to mitigate the risks.

In the original ISS plans is a particularly elegant but admittedly expensive piece of hardware for biological research: a large centrifuge that would rotate at a speed sufficient to reproduce the 1-g gravitational force of Earth. That centrifuge is key to high-quality space biology simply because it would allow for a 1-g control on all flight experiments. Without it we cannot be sure that an effect observed in organisms raised on orbit is due to the absence of gravity or some other factor, such as the unusually high radiation of space or astronauts banging around.

Most life science hardware components are at the end of the schedule and are the most threatened by downsizing. Thankfully an independent, high-level, NASA advisory panel last summer recommended against dropping the centrifuge. The panel arrived instead at an almost equally unpalatable solution: redefine the end point for what constitutes "core" completion of the ISS, then run the station with a stripped-down crew and little life science hardware until a better solution can be found. This strategy will delay centrifuge launch until late in this decade.

Is there some way that NASA and its partners can contain their costs yet still produce a functional ISS in an amount of time that is useful to scientists alive today? My solution is to head for Mars.

At the moment there is little economic incentive for any manufacturer of ISS hardware, as well as some governmental overseers, to complete the work on time or within budget. No bigger and better projects await them once the ISS is finished. The companies and governmental agencies that make up the ISS partnership need an incentive to get the job done. I propose that we set in place the following house rule: Eligibility to build Mars mission hardware will be conditional on the participant meeting firm schedules and bringing costs in under budget. For this to work, the United States and its partner countries need to give more than lip service to a human mission to Mars. Some money has to be put into the project. Any funds initially committed to a Mars mission would be well invested if tied to an ISS incentive program.

What would it take to get some humans to Mars and back within the next 20 years? The key is for Congress to ante up enough money to make it a tangible rather than a gratuitous verbal pledge.

There is much debate about how much science human explorers could accomplish on their maiden mission to Mars. The major obstacle to getting a human mission manifested is, ironically, not financial but scientific. The scientific justification for sending people to Mars at this time is iffy. Robots, the critics tell us, can do soil sampling cheaper and safer. So robots should go first - indeed they already have. Prospecting for fossils is a bit more complicated and is typically put forth as the sort of scientific investigation that requires humans on site.

However, the question of a scientific justification for the mission is a red herring. Science may be one justification for some space exploration, but it is neither the longest nor the strongest one. A more fundamental driving force for humans to rise above low Earth orbit is our awe of the heavens and desire to ascend. As a practicing space biologist, I know that there is still much to learn about how extended space travel affects living systems. Nevertheless I believe that putting humans in space has less to do with answering questions about gravity's influence on biological processes than a simple universal and never-ending wish - a wish to be there whenever we look up.

It seems inevitable that we will go to Mars. Enough people want it to happen. Already we have seen a company spend more than a million dollars to send one of its employees into space for hardly a week (the Tokyo Broadcasting System in 1990). And barely a decade later Dennis Tito individually spent almost 20 times that for his trip of similar length.

If individuals are willing to make that sort of commitment, it is time for the governments of space-faring nations to do the same. A commitment to a Mars mission would do more than obligate the ISS partners to finish construction. It would help prioritize and instruct ISS activities. Research related to astronaut health and safety would obviously top the list. There would be little question that the life science hardware should be on the station sooner rather than later. For it is life science research that has the most relevance to the safety of astronauts on any long-term mission, including one to Mars.

Richard Wassersug (tadpole@is.dal.ca) is based in the department of anatomy and neurobiology at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Currently, however, he is "Scientist-in-Residence" for the Canadian Discovery Channel.

The Scientist 16[3]:60, Feb. 4, 2002
Copyright 2002,
The Scientist Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduced with permission