A planned first settlement on Mars is being postponed by SpaceX as it shifts focus to landing on the Moon, and a University of Houston professor says Elon Musk’s company made a good decision, if it’s done the right way.
The new plan leaves much of the effort to get to Mars in the hands of Blue Origin, the company partially controlled by another billionaire, Amazon’s
SpaceX had planned the Mars mission for later this year, but that might have been rushing things a little because such a broad undertaking requires extremely careful planning — any little thing that goes wrong could postpone the whole mission.
And that’s the problem, the planets Earth and Mars have to be in a special kind of alignment for the window of opportunity to be open for traveling between the two planets, and that window is only open every 18 months to two years.
Blue Origin is ahead in the Mars race with SpaceX, but it may be up to both of them to learn to work together if it’s true that this all comes down a race with China to the Moon and Mars.
Legendary University of Houston space architect professor Larry Bell says many years of work have been done on a planned mission between Mars and Earth, but it’s the right move for SpaceX to concentrate for now on a Moon landing first, because exploration of space should be done in steps, but especially in double steps.
“You need to plan Mars first and then decide what are the elements we need to test to go to Mars and develop them in advance so they can have dual use,” Professor Bell says.
And though the physical requirements of the two missions will be somewhat similar, focusing on the differences between the surfaces of the Moon and Mars will require resolute attention to detail.
“A way to offload payloads onto the surface and move them around autonomously and hook them up to power systems, including communications, and that may be in the middle of a dust storm, which often happens on Mars.”
The challenges present endless opportunities to make mistakes, that’s why Bell says he frequently is thankful to be part of the University of Houston’s cooperative effort with SpaceX on these programs.
“We’re putting together a very comprehensive plan to establish a settlement on Mars by the year 2045 that will supply a settlement of 16 people.”
Professor Bell also says he and his colleagues at the U of H Hines College of Architecture and elsewhere have other related projects that are expected to be released as soon coordination with SpaceX is worked out.