Space: Onward to Mars

A dramatic launch heralds a new era of missions to the Red Planet

  • Share
  • Read Later

(9 of 10)

Another possible hazard on a long space journey has its source on planet earth: human nature. Soviet flights have demonstrated that performance levels begin to decrease as the days stretch into months. Cosmonaut Yuri Romanenko, whose 326 days aboard the space station Mir set a space endurance record last year, was down to only two hours of productive work a day toward the end of his eleven-month flight and had become decidedly peevish. "Leave me alone," he once snapped to mission control. "I have a lot of work to do."

Both American and Soviet behavioral scientists have begun to investigate small-group dynamics, which are likely to assume considerable significance during extended spaceflight. "There are always minor irritations involved in working with other people," says Psychologist Clay Foushee, of NASA's Ames Research Center. "Normally, these are not a problem because you can get up and move away. The trouble occurs when you can't leave a situation." That trouble can become catastrophic. Long Antarctic expeditions, which involve small groups isolated for months, have been marred by fights and occasional violence.

Other questions about group dynamics abound. Among the foremost: Should women be included on a Mars expedition? If so, what about sex? No one likes to talk publicly about that, admits NASA Flight Surgeon Patricia Santy. "There's no reason, even in a highly motivated professional crew, that the same kind of sexual tensions that develop here in offices aren't going to develop in space." Santy believes women should be included in the crew. If they are, she says, there should be at least two -- both for mutual support and to avoid disruptive sexual entanglements aloft. Former Astronaut Michael Collins has suggested an even simpler remedy: send up a crew of four married couples. "But eight is a bad number," he concedes, "because you want an odd number; in arguments, you don't want to risk a 4-to-4 tie vote."

For all the enthusiastic talk about a manned mission to Mars, many influential voices have been raised against it. None is more formidable than that of University of Iowa Physicist James Van Allen, the discoverer in 1958 of the earth-girdling radiation belts that today bear his name. With other scientists, he has long been critical of the shuttle, the space station and other programs that draw funds away from space science. "Any serious talk of a manned Mars mission at this time is grossly inappropriate," he says, arguing that the top priority of the U.S. should be to develop and build expendable rockets to launch satellites and space probes. "To talk about manned missions to Mars when we can't even launch a 500-lb. satellite is totally off the wall."

Van Allen believes a manned Mars mission would be "monstrously" expensive, further draining money from more economical unmanned scientific probes. The Mars mission does have a certain appeal, he concedes, because "it's a matter of high adventure. But if you want to put it on any practical basis, it's totally uncompetitive with unmanned spacecraft by a factor of ten."

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10