Dear readers, faithful companions of my starry nights,
There are nights when the sky speaks to us, and days when the stock market deafens us. The latest thunderous market debut of a certain space company, propelled by its charismatic and controversial founder, has left me pensive. I am an astronomer. I love space. I love exploration. But I also love truth. And I cannot, in good conscience, let you believe that the journey to Mars, as it is being sold to us, is a glorious epic waiting just around the corner. It is time to ask the uncomfortable question: behind the promises, is there not a financial trap? A scam, pure and simple, dressed up in interstellar dreams?
Let us take the example of the voyage to Mars. Let us analyse it, step by step, with the rigour of a scientist and the prudence of a night watchman. We shall draw from it unavoidable conclusions.
Step 1: Leaving Earth
Everything begins here, on our blue planet. To reach Mars, one must first wrench oneself free of Earth’s gravitational well. That seems almost routine, does it not? We have been sending rockets into space for over half a century. But there is a fundamental difference between sending a probe weighing a few tonnes toward the Red Planet and dispatching a human crew with everything they need to survive.
A human being is not a robot. They breathe, they eat, they drink, they produce waste, they need warmth, protection, space, sleep, medical care. The mere launch of a crewed mission to Mars would require a colossal mass, far beyond anything we have ever placed in orbit. The International Space Station, assembled over decades, weighs roughly four hundred tonnes. A crewed Martian mission, with fuel, provisions, habitats, and life-support systems, would probably weigh between one thousand and two thousand tonnes. And yet, the most powerful launcher ever conceived, SpaceX’s Starship, has yet to prove it can reliably reach orbit with a significant payload. It explodes. It falls back. It is in perpetual development.
Let us assume we succeed. The very act of leaving Earth already exposes astronauts to considerable risks: vibrations, extreme accelerations, catastrophic failure. We lost Challenger. We lost Columbia. Every launch is a wager. And we are talking here of a launch ten times more massive, a hundred times more complex. The first step alone is a potential graveyard.
Step 2: Crossing the Interplanetary Void
Let us suppose the crew survives the launch. They are now in the void, en route to Mars. The journey will last between six and nine months. Six to nine months inside a metal box, with no outside air, no gravity, no natural protection against radiation.
Let us speak of radiation. It is the elephant in the capsule. On Earth, we are shielded by our atmosphere and our magnetic field, which deflect charged particles arriving from the Sun and from deep space. In interplanetary space, this protection does not exist. The astronauts would be exposed to solar particles, especially during eruptions, and to galactic cosmic rays, high-energy atomic nuclei that tear through flesh like microscopic bullets. A major solar eruption could kill a crew in a matter of hours through acute radiation sickness. Cosmic rays, for their part, increase the risk of cancer and damage the central nervous system. The dose received would exceed all safety limits. And we have no realistic shielding solution.
Next, microgravity. Over months, the human body unmakes itself: muscles waste away, bones demineralise, the heart weakens, the immune system becomes disordered, vision blurs. Astronauts aboard the International Space Station endure these effects, but they are within reach of rescue. On the way to Mars, there is no rescue. An appendicitis, an injury, a dental infection, and it is a catastrophe. No hospital. No possible return.
And then, confinement. Six to nine months shut inside a reduced volume, with the same faces, without sky, without wind, without the smell of earth. Earth-based isolation experiments have shown that even the best-prepared individuals suffer from sleep disorders, depression, and interpersonal conflicts. In space, these tensions would be amplified. One astronaut who breaks down, and a mission is in peril.
Step 3: Landing on Mars
After months of travel, the crew arrives within sight of Mars. An ochre ball, cold, desolate. Now they must land. And landing on Mars is one of the most perilous manoeuvres in all of astronautics.
Mars has an atmosphere, but it is a hundred times thinner than Earth’s. This means it cannot slow a vessel sufficiently through friction, as we do on Earth with heat shields. But it is dense enough to cause intense heating and turbulence. One must combine heat shields, supersonic parachutes, and retrorockets. Each of these technologies is delicate. Supersonic parachutes, for instance, are notoriously difficult to deploy at high speed in a thin atmosphere. NASA spent years perfecting the landing system for its rovers, and even rovers are small masses compared to a crewed vessel.
Landing a human crew, with its habitat, provisions, and survival equipment, represents a challenge of an entirely different magnitude. The mass to be set down is enormous. Martian gravity, though weaker than Earth’s, is far stronger than the Moon’s. Any malfunction during descent would be fatal. No turning back possible. No rescue mission. Landing is a point of no return.
Step 4: Surviving on Mars
Let us suppose the impossible. The crew is on Mars, alive. They must now survive. And survival on Mars is a logistical nightmare.
Mars is a frozen desert. Average temperature: minus sixty degrees. Unbreathable atmosphere, composed of ninety-five percent carbon dioxide. Atmospheric pressure so low that liquid water instantly boils away. Global dust storms that can last for months. Soil covered in perchlorates, salts toxic to human life. No global magnetic field, thus no protection against radiation. Gravity one-third that of Earth, whose long-term effects on the human body are unknown.
To survive, they would need a pressurised habitat, suits, air and water recycling systems, reliable energy sources, and sufficient food for months, if not years. Every kilogram of this equipment would have had to be transported from Earth, at a staggering energy cost. Proponents of colonisation speak of using local resources: extracting oxygen from Martian CO₂, drawing water from subsurface ice. But these technologies are in their infancy on Earth, and entirely non-existent at the required scale on Mars.
And then there is the return. For a mission without a return is not colonisation; it is a death sentence. To come back, one would have to lift off from Mars with a rocket full of fuel produced on site or shipped from Earth. The technical challenge is vertiginous. To this day, we have not even managed to bring back a sample of Martian soil, a small pebble of a few hundred grams. So, a human crew with its return habitat, its provisions, its heat shields to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere? We are light-decades away.
Step 5: The Question of Money and Promises
At this point, I must return to the intuition that motivated this article: the financial trap. The scam.
A crewed voyage to Mars would cost, according to the most optimistic estimates, hundreds of billions of dollars. Some speak of a thousand billion. A trillion. These are sums that could eradicate hunger in the world, finance the energy transition, save our oceans, restore our forests, educate entire generations. To invest them in a project whose probability of success is infinitesimal, with a zero return on investment — is that visionary philanthropy or pure madness? Or worse: a means of diverting attention and capital toward private enterprises, inflated on the stock market by promises that will never be kept?
I cannot help but think of the dot-com bubble, the cryptocurrency bubble, all those pyramids of dreams that collapsed. Private space companies have accomplished feats, that is undeniable. But the rhetoric of Martian colonisation sometimes resembles a smokescreen. Dreams are sold to raise funds, and meanwhile, deadlines slip, costs explode, prototypes fail, and shareholders wait, hypnotised by the vision of a dome under a pink sky.
Conclusion: The Unavoidable Verdict
Dear readers, you have followed me step by step. Launch, crossing, landing, survival, return. Every step is riddled with mortal risks, unsolved challenges, non-existent technologies. Taken one by one, they are nearly impossible. Taken together, they form an insurmountable wall.
The conclusion is unavoidable. The voyage to Mars, as sold by the merchants of dreams, is an illusion. A dangerous illusion, for it diverts minds and resources from the real challenges awaiting us on Earth. A costly illusion, for it siphons money away from fundamental research, the kind that allows us to understand our own planet, our own climate, our own survival.
I am not saying we should not explore. I am an astronomer; exploration is my reason for living. But exploration is done with robots, probes, telescopes. The human exploration of Mars is a distant horizon, so distant that it may be unreachable. In the meantime, we have a planet to save, an atmosphere to repair, a humanity to protect. Mars can wait. Mars will always wait. Earth will not.
I return to my telescope. The lantern burns, the basketball rests on the table. And I think of you, dear readers, who have the power to distinguish the true from the false, the dream from the illusion, hope from the empty promise. Keep your eyes open. Keep your heads cool. And lift your eyes to the stars, but never forget that our only home, for now and for a long time to come, lies beneath your feet.
François
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