By Samaira Kalia
How far away are we from having the dream of the next generation of CIS students graduating from the Red Planet? Some would say 225 million kilometres – an incredibly long way to go for our world – but by the time we all grow up, travel to Mars might have become the new normal.
But, to make our vision a reality, we need a rocket powerful enough to take the first explorers with enough food, water, supplies, and fuel to last a typical, year-long, round-trip journey from Earth to Mars and back. We need to learn how to live and work productively, away from Earth, in harsh environments with much colder temperatures, much higher amounts of radiation, lower levels of gravity, and a lack of oxygen and water.
The famed rocket scientist Krafft Ehricke once said,
If God wanted man to become a spacefaring species, He would have given man a Moon.
Our Moon is the perfect test-bed for humans to learn how to survive in the deep corners of our solar system. In many ways, the Moon has a much more extreme environment compared to Mars. So if we learn how to survive long periods on the Moon, we can use some of those learnings as we set about building a base on Mars as well.
Just like Mars, scientists are expecting a lot of water ice on the Moon, especially near the South Pole, with several permanently shadowed areas. Learning how to mine and use this water is critical because the Hydrogen-Oxygen combustion fuel is the most energetic chemical reaction, known for its use in rockets, allowing more people and material to be transported. Ice could also be used as a source of drinking water for future crewed missions and space stations.
Around the world, space agencies are even attempting to build a sustainable presence on the Moon as a first step toward interplanetary travel. NASA is eager to land the first woman and the first person of colour on the Moon by 2025. These astronauts will then explore the surface and lay the groundwork for future missions to Mars. NASA’s Artemis 1 was launched last November, and NASA is hoping to replicate its success with the launch of Artemis 2 within this year. The Americans have competition from the Russian space agency, known as Roscosmos, which started its Luna project way back in 1959 with the launch of Luna 1. Then, in August 2023, Roscosmos launched its first Moon-landing spacecraft after 47 years – Luna 25 – as an attempt to reach the South Pole before anyone else. A little more than a week later, Luna 25 lost its signal and it was soon announced that the ship had crashed into the Moon instead of landing. China has also announced its plans to land astronauts on the Moon by the end of the decade.
India has been the fourth country in the race, besides the US, Russia, and China. Just a week after Russia’s Luna 25 crashed, India’s ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation) managed to land its own Chandrayaan-3, becoming the first space agency to deploy a lander on the lunar South pole successfully.
Why should we be using the Moon to help us go to Mars? For one thing, the Moon has a light atmosphere, and its magnetic field is weaker than Earth’s, so it’s easier for rockets to leave the Moon. On Earth, a rocket usually needs to produce 3.5 million kilograms of thrust to escape the Earth’s gravitational pull. Meanwhile, the Moon’s escape velocity is much lower. A rocket on the Moon needs almost five times less force to lift off compared to a rocket lifting off on Earth. While the optimal path to Mars will have to be informed by the outcome of experiments on the Moon, scientists believe that we can potentially use the Moon as a ‘pit-stop’ on our way to Mars. Hollywood has, in fact, managed to one-up NASA scientists, when they depicted precisely this scenario in the 2019 movie ‘Ad Astra’, starring Brad Pitt.
In this scenario, instead of building mammoth rockets that travel directly to Mars, we would build reusable rockets that just need to be large enough to escape Earth’s gravity and reach the Moon. There, our rocket would land and re-fuel, while our astronauts would acclimatize to living outside Earth. The base on the Moon would also be stocked with equipment and supplies that would be loaded onto the rocket for the final leg of the journey to Mars. One can almost imagine the new Moonbase becoming much like the airports of today, servicing dozens of spaceflights in and out each day! Once on Mars, our astronauts would use the locally available water ice, and nuclear energy, to power up their new home, schools, and hospitals, and for the return trip home.
Scientists estimate our first manned mission to land on Mars in 2029. Within the next decade, the human population on Mars will cross 200, nearing the minimum viable population required for sustained human presence on the planet. As the population grows, we will start to evolve as a species too, perhaps with CIS-ians of the future carrying slightly altered ‘Martian’ genomics that would help them survive better.
So how far are we from a Canadian International School on Mars? Not too far, one would say. There’s only a wait of a few years, and maybe you’ll be one of the ace academics of the future called to teach on the famous Red Planet!