The case against a Mars colony

When there’s talk about people from planet Earth going to live somewhere else in the solar system, more often than not the envisioned destination is Mars. Daniel R. Adamo says we’re getting way ahead of ourselves on that scenario. Adamo, a co-founder of the Space Enterprise Institute who worked 60 space shuttle missions from the flight dynamics desk, gave a talk titled, “Questioning the Surface of Mars as the 21st Century’s Ultimate Pioneering Destination in Space” at the recent Pacific Northwest Aerospace Expo held at Portland State University.

Daniel R. Adamo spoke about the prospects for colonizing
Mars during a presentation at the Pacific Northwest Aerospace
Expo Sept. 28, 2019 at Portland State University. Photo:
Greg Scheiderer.

“We’ve been brainwashed by information that is a hundred years old or more into thinking Mars is the place to go,” Adamo said. Everything from Percival Lowell’s erroneous conclusions that intelligent beings built canals on Mars to much of the science fiction of the 20th Century made the Red Planet an alluring celestial sphere for earthlings.

“Mars is a socio-cultural destination,” Adamo said.

Adamo draws a distinction between exploration and pioneering of Mars, and he’s all for the former, though he contends robots remain best suited for discovery.

“If the aim is to explore as much as possible, telepresence from a moon of Mars is cheaper, more productive, and more safe than putting people on the surface,” he said. With a control center on Deimos, for example, people could operate rovers and such without the lengthy communication lag that makes that more of a challenge from Earth.

For those who would extract resources from Mars, Adamo points out that there’s nothing there we can’t get at home, and if there was some sort of useful new mystery ore it would still be safer to have robots do the mining.

Problems with colonizing Mars

For a colony on Mars to make sense, Adamo says a number of things have to happen. There has to be a reason to go. The colony needs an economy. And people need to be able to survive and thrive there. At present, he contends none of those things are true.

He noted that human migration has always happened for a reason, whether it was war, famine, pestilence, oppression, or some other condition that made people feel their backs were up against the wall. There’s also no credible threat to our survival here like an impending asteroid strike. There’s simply no reason to leave Earth and live somewhere else. If there was, Adamo says there’s been no way shown to sustain such a colony; there’s no business plan.

“Ultimately, you’d better return sustained profits because even if you’re just a colony you’d better send some resources to the mother country to justify all of those finished goods that they’re sending you that make quality of life possible,” he said. “You’re not going to be mooching off the taxpayers.”

Survivability is the biggest challenge Adamo sees to Mars colonization. Solar and cosmic radiation would force people to live under ground; it’s not the most appealing notion, but he contends regular work on the surface of Mars is not realistic if you want to live long. The biggest wild card he sees is gravity. It’s a complete unknown whether humans could procreate on Mars, where gravity is just 38 percent as strong as it is on Earth. Without children, you’re not going to put down multigenerational roots on another world.

Adamo isn’t suggesting that the notion of colonizing Mars be abandoned, but he says we need to know a lot more before making such a move. He suggests we might study the gravity question first from habitats in low-Earth orbit and later on small bodies such as near-Earth asteroids. Then we could learn how people adapt to lower gravity. He says pioneering on Mars should only be considered if it can be shown that we can thrive there economically and biologically.

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The Pacific Northwest Aerospace Expo was hosted by the Portland State Aerospace Society, an interdisciplinary student aerospace project at Portland State University. They plan to make the expo an annual event.