Horizon (1964–…): Season 50, Episode 8 - Man on Mars: Mission to the Red Planet - full transcript
EXPLOSIVE BLAST
Ignition.
Mars, the Red Planet.
We've long wondered
if it's harboured life.
Some have dreamt of walking
on its surface.
More than four decades
after they landed on the Moon,
NASA are now imagining a two-year
ride across space...
..to Mars.
The scorecard of Mars
is at best 50/50.
It's tough to get there.
If you think about putting humans
in harm's way, it's a tough job.
To do it, they need
new rockets on a new scale...
..a new way of surviving in space...
..and a new breed of astronauts...
Think about a mission to Mars.
What is it? Is it outdoor stuff,
or is it confinement?
And then I see somebody that says,
"I have a stamp collection,
"I do a lot of reading,
I enjoy watching movies."
And I'm thinking, "That might be
good for confinement."
To finally go to Mars
would be the fulfilment
of one of our grandest dreams.
I long for a time when I can
actually walk out of my back yard,
stare at space, spot Mars,
and actually think,
"There are humans on Mars, right
now, and we helped put them there."
But is this ultimately
a dream NASA can really deliver?
Right now on Mars, there is
an object the size of a car,
roaming about on the surface.
It was sent across
vast voids of space
to this harsh and rocky planet.
And now, every day, it opens
its eyes upon on another world,
trawls the surface for signs of life
and sends back images like these...
Now NASA want to go a stage further
and put a group of people
up here with it.
And so the man who masterminded
the landing of this rover
is now part of a team
trying to work out
if humans can safely be sent
to join it on Mars.
Mars is a tough place to get to.
It's a scary, expensive
and risky proposition for robots.
When you think about pitting a human
in harm's way,
you've got to double down
on your engineering
to make sure
that everything goes right.
The simple truth is that
much of the technology they'll need
doesn't yet exist.
People get, I think, confused
by the technologies on Star Trek.
And perhaps in 400 or 500 years
from now,
we'll have those
kinds of technologies available.
But for the present time,
if we want to do space exploration,
there are risks.
And the longer the mission,
and the farther away we go,
then the higher
the risks are going to be.
The history of previous, unmanned,
missions provides little comfort.
So Mars is a risky place to go.
Early attempts -
Mariner 3 and Mariner 8,
almost everything the Soviets
tried to put there,
the Mars Polar Lander in '99 -
all these missions have failed.
The scorecard of Mars is
at best 50/50.
So as NASA set their sights
on a manned mission to Mars,
can they pull it off?
The scientists and engineers
at NASA are returning
to the business they're famous for -
transforming a fantastical idea into
a precise set of engineering plans.
These are the people who must face,
and overcome,
every problem involved in sending
human beings
56 million kilometres from Earth.
Everything from stopping them
from going mad with boredom,
to dealing with years
of human waste.
It's quite a challenge.
And the team must begin at the
beginning, by escaping planet Earth.
If anyone should ever ask you
to build a spaceship to go to Mars,
then, like any craftsman,
you first have to find
a space to work in.
This vast hangar, once home
to key parts of the Apollo rockets
and Space Shuttle, is where
a rocket that'll one day
go to Mars will take shape.
Ricardo Navarro
is clearing the decks
so that assembly
of the rocket can begin.
It's so much larger than what
we did here before. So much taller.
The best way to assemble something
this complex and this big
is to assemble it vertically.
You generally want
to build like you fly.
So they start at the bottom,
with the fuel tanks.
This is as high as we can go using
the elevator. The rest is on foot.
It's hard to tell
with this big of a space
how big the actual vehicle's
going to be, the rocket.
But you can actually already see
some signs emerging.
You can see that blue circle
forming.
That is the actual diameter
of the rocket.
So you can imagine something
of that diameter, all the way up
to about ten feet below
where we are right now,
being the actual size
of the hydrogen tank.
Even at this height,
we cannot contain the entire rocket.
The rocket is called
the Space Launch System, or SLS.
And this building can only
accommodate half of it.
So far, very little of the SLS
exists beyond the drawing boards,
save for one part
that's already under construction.
Here, in New Orleans,
they're building the first section
of this monster rocket -
the fuel tanks.
Lead engineer Todd May has come
to see the first completed section.
And this is what it's like
to be inside a rocket.
To keep it light,
it's made out of aluminium,
using a design inspired by nature.
This is an iso-grid pattern.
It looks a little like honeycombs.
You know, bees are pretty smart.
We make this this way to actually
keep most of the strength
of the material while being able to
remove 90% of the weight.
Keeping the weight down
is imperative,
because this seven-metre-high slab
is just one of many
which will make up
the overall rocket.
Now, to make a core of a rocket,
you actually have to have
the equivalent of ten of these tall.
You have a hydrogen tank, which is
the equivalent of five of these,
plus a dome on either end.
And then the liquid oxygen tank,
which is two of these
with a dome on either end.
The core, when you're finished, is
two thirds of a football field long.
By the time you add
the interim upper stage,
it's taller than
the Statue of Liberty.
This giant piece of metal
will be useful for just moments.
So, to give you a sense
of what's going on through launch,
this section, which is
filled with rocket fuel,
is pouring it out through
the engines very quickly.
Just one section like this
would empty in about a minute.
This is the only piece of the rocket
that exists right now.
But before it can be tested in 2017,
millions of other parts
will be made to join it.
July 1969. The launch of Apollo 11.
The mission - to leave Earth
and carry three men
in a 30-ton capsule...
..a distance
of 385,000 kilometres...
..and to be the first to step on the
surface of a body other than Earth.
It was a phenomenal feat.
And the whole experience
took little more than a week.
CHEERING
But Mars is a very different
proposition to the Moon.
Lying 56 million kilometres
from Earth,
Mars is over 140 times farther away.
With current technology,
a return journey
would take around three years,
and require a team
of four to eight astronauts.
Anyone who thinks this is Apollo
with bigger rockets
needs to think again.
Because this is a mission that
will take man, for the first time,
out of Earth's orbit,
leaving its protection far behind.
Stennis, Mississippi.
This is the place
where every single rocket engine
that NASA has ever built
has been tested...
..from Saturn V to the Space Shuttle
main engine.
Today, Mission Control are setting
up for a full-power burn
of one of their latest models.
Gary Benton,
who's in charge of rocket testing,
has come to oversee the burn.
SIREN BLARES
The one-minute siren.
So we're within a minute now.
We're getting close. My heart's
beating pretty fast right now.
I've got some adrenaline
rushing through me.
And there'll be more once it
cranks up here in a few minutes.
We're off!
An engine like this
will be just one of six
which will help propel
the SLS into orbit.
Looks like a safe shutdown.
So when the time comes to test
the much bigger SLS rocket,
it must be at the largest
stand they have.
Like so much in the mission to Mars,
they'll be standing on the shoulders
of NASA's previous missions,
borrowing and re-purposing the best
from Apollo and the Shuttle.
How's it going, man?
It's going good. All right.
B Stand was built
over 50 years ago
for the testing of the Saturn
engines that carried the Apollo
missions to space.
You can't walk round there, cos
there's so many people. Right.
Gary and his team will be reshaping
and upgrading this stand
so that it can cope
with the next generation of rockets.
This is the same crane that we used
to lift those Saturn V four-stages
and we're going to use the very same
crane to lift the SLS four-stage
and place it in this facility,
anchor it down really good.
Firing off about two million pounds
of thrust.
And that's going to be the biggest
test we've done out here
since we did the Saturn V.
There's a palpable
sense of excitement here
because for the first time
in decades,
they're thinking of using these
rockets to send PEOPLE
beyond Earth's orbit.
For now, this is NASA's
best vision of what a rocket
bound for Mars would look like.
'Eight, seven, six, five, four...'
But if you're going
all the way to Mars,
a single rocket of this size
is not enough.
NASA estimates that they will
need at least seven launches
to get all the equipment
they need up into space.
The fuel, the food,
the Mars Lander -
all will need to be launched
into Earth's orbit
and then assembled in space,
much as the Space Station has been.
Only then will it be ready
to leave Earth's orbit.
But there's an uncomfortable truth
about the journey ahead.
Since they can't carry enough
fuel for the full distance,
they need to rely on
Mars's gravity to pull them in.
It's called the slingshot effect
and it means that once they're off,
there's no turning back.
Anyone who's willing to leave
the safety of Earth behind
needs to be a very particular
type of person.
Back in the days of Apollo 11,
picking a crew was straightforward.
It was clear
who had the right stuff.
Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin
and Michael Collins
were the cream
of US supersonic flight.
They were drawn from the elite
world of fighter and test pilots.
And with that came supreme hand-eye
co-ordination and physical daring.
But these may not be the same skills
you'd need to go to Mars.
I noticed that a lot of the
astronauts were of the old school.
"I hunt, I fish, I ski,
"I climb mountains, I climb trees..."
You know, lots of outdoor stuff.
But think about a mission to Mars.
What is it?
Is it outdoor stuff
or is it confinement?
And then I see somebody that says,
"I have a stamp collection,
"I do a lot of reading,
I enjoy watching movies."
And I'm thinking, "That might be
good for confinement!"
Dr David Dinges is interested
in how you select a crew
and safeguard their psychological
welfare in space.
And the key issue is really
understanding who's going to develop
a problem and when will it develop?
Will all the crew develop it?
How do we detect it?
How do we prevent it to begin with?
To date, the only answers
come from a Russian study -
an Earth-bound simulation
of the approximately 520 days
in isolation it would take
for a return trip to the Red Planet.
As the Russian study was gearing up,
Dr Dinges set himself a challenge.
Could he use his expert knowledge
to anticipate
who would fare best in confinement?
In the Mars 520 mission
I watched the crew intensively.
I wanted to see them during
the maelstrom of media attention
before they went in to the chamber
and how they interacted
in that environment.
And body posture, where they were
looking, what they said.
When they went in,
he made his prediction.
And I made notes and I wrote
down a variety of things.
I made predictions - and this is
true - I sealed it up in an envelope
and put it in the drawer and
waited till the mission was over.
In this footage, released
by the European Space Agency,
the astronauts look well.
But by the end,
deep troubles were brewing.
The bottom line is that out
of six people who went,
only two didn't have significant
behavioural problems
of one kind or another.
A couple of them
experienced insomnia.
One experienced some depression.
Another was more socially isolated.
But the two I predicted would make it
just fine made it just fine.
Like the Apollo missions,
the Russian study was all-male.
But what if NASA were to shake up
this tradition?
I suspect we're going to find
there are some areas women have
a slight advantage. In some areas
men have a slight advantage.
Bone loss or radiation. And so
I think a mixed crew is likely.
The agencies want to show that the
astronauts represent humanity, right?
And that's a reasonable thing to do.
NASA hope to launch
the mission in 2033.
So the astronauts who'll get to go
are probably still at school.
If you were among those astronauts
on board,
you'd sense the major physical
challenge immediately -
a lack of gravity.
It's a problem faced
every day on the Space Station
but, so far, no-one has spent
more than 15 months in low gravity.
But if you were on your way to Mars,
you'd be away for twice that time.
For the scientists the question is,
how do you understand
the long-term effects
of weightlessness here on Earth?
Good afternoon! Time for lunch.
Lunch, already?
Yes. Isn't it amazing how time
flies? Let's eat! Bon appetit!
Welcome to the weird, horizontal
world of Frank and Daniel.
They've volunteered to spend
70 days in a row lying down,
as part of an ongoing study
on the effects of weightlessness.
That's because the closest thing
to zero-g conditions
here on Earth is to lie in bed.
But that's much harder work
than it looks.
The second morning waking up
from the bed-rest,
you kind of, you know, want to try to
normally sit up like you normally do,
but then you bring the lamp
down to you to turn on your lights.
You don't go up to the lamp.
It's a little difficult.
Yeah, taking a dump here's
not too pleasant!
But, you know, what can you do?
You've got to do it.
It's not too bad, you know.
I guess I can finally say I know how
to use one of our bedpans!
HE LAUGHS
You should try it.
It's a good experience!
HE LAUGHS
Hey, Frank, how is it going?
It's been pretty good, you know.
You're on bed-rest day 28!
That's correct.
Yeah, so how was it when you first
went head down?
Dr Roni Cromwell
is running the trial,
which overall has 27 subjects.
So we get people
from all walks of life.
We've had people
who are between jobs,
that are looking
for something to do.
We've had people that wish they
had been able to be an astronaut
and since that couldn't happen, they
wanted to do the next best thing.
Roni ensures that all the subjects
are kept with their heads tilted
six degrees down, which best
emulates the effects of space.
And by tipping them six degrees
head down tilt,
we see the headward fluid shifts,
that is similar to what astronauts
experience in space as well.
And by doing that we can then study
the mechanisms for these changes
as well as develop countermeasures
to mitigate these changes.
A typical day starts
with breakfast in bed...
..and a shower...in bed.
After lunch, tests...in bed.
My favourite part!
Today, they're investigating
a mission-critical problem -
why astronauts often
lose their appetite in space.
During weightlessness,
body fluids flow into the head
and scientists believe
this may affect the airflow.
So they're measuring the size
of Frank's nasal cavity,
to look for swelling
which might restrict
his sense of smell and taste.
Daniel is slightly luckier.
He's among the 50% of subjects
who are selected
to occasionally escape bed
to study the effects of exercise.
It can be a little bewildering...
The reason for optimising
the exercise programme
is to find the best sort of recipe
for the exercise that's needed
to preserve muscle and bone
in our astronauts.
Exercise has long been known
as a means of staving off
loss of bone and muscle mass
in space.
Because the effects of this
can be devastating.
These astronauts, just landed
from the Soyuz capsule in 2013,
are too weak to even stand,
let alone walk.
On a mission to Mars, the effects
would be even more pronounced.
After all,
it's a much longer journey.
But there'll be no-one on Mars
to carry them away.
The astronauts must be able to step
out of the capsule
and onto the Martian surface
by themselves.
Scientists are realising that
exercise alone, however optimised,
is not enough.
If humans are ever going to be
strong enough to explore
the Martian surface,
they'll need some other help
to keep them fit
for the adventure ahead.
You may never even notice it,
but millions of years of evolution
have finely tuned your body
to conditions on planet Earth,
so that cells in your muscle
and your bone simply can't grow
without the force of gravity
acting on them.
So Dr Randall Urban is looking
for something that can stimulate
muscle and bone growth,
in the absence of gravity.
And he's turned his attention
to a chemical
that's well known for building
your body.
Well, testosterone
is a very interesting hormone
and it seems to be primarily
responsible for protection of bone
and protection of muscle.
Dr Urban is working
with the bed-rest study.
He's giving regular injections
of testosterone
to half of the subjects
who are exercising.
But it's a double-blind study,
so no-one knows who's getting
the testosterone and who isn't.
We see that one of the exercise
groups is doing much better
than the other exercise group.
In our minds, we think
that may be the testosterone group
which is showing that benefit.
Daniel doesn't know whether he's
received the testosterone or not.
He'll just keep on running
and having his bone and muscle mass
monitored, until his 70 days are up.
The results of the study will help
determine whether astronauts
travelling to Mars
will take doses of testosterone
to keep their bones
and muscles strong.
But that raises
an interesting question.
What if some of those astronauts
are women?
When we use testosterone in women
we have to be very concerned
about the side effects
which actually will cause them
to develop male characteristics.
We would have to be figuring out
ways to deliver testosterone
in low enough doses
that you wouldn't get
any of those other characteristics
in the women.
It remains to be seen whether
testosterone can be given to women,
not to mention a group of
competitive men in a confined space.
But the health risks
of travelling to Mars
don't just threaten the body.
Perhaps the greatest challenge
of all is in the mind.
Ignition.
Imagine you're one of the astronauts
and you've now been on board
for several months,
in the same small place,
with the same few people.
You've played all
the games on your tablet
and the view out of the window
never changes.
You may start to feel a little
bored. Perhaps a little glum.
And this is important, not just
because it's nice to be happy.
Having a functioning team
on a spaceship
can be a matter of life and death.
If you become depressed
in space flight,
if you develop a poor interaction
style or you become socially
isolated because something's wrong
and your brain can't cope
or your behaviour's off, or you
become cognitively impaired,
then you pose a risk for yourself
and the rest of the crew
and the mission.
These problems occurred in the past
with Shackleton, with Nansen,
with Amundsen,
with all the great expeditions.
They remain fundamental problems.
One solution being tested
by Dr Dinges and his team
is to use the spacecraft's
on-board cameras
to watch over the astronauts
day and night.
I want to review, sort of, what
we've got. OK, so get position.
Centre yourself.
Dr Dinges and his team are using
new facial recognition software,
and its success hinges
on identifying tell-tale signs
in the face, which betray what
the mind beyond is really thinking.
Number one, for just tracking
purposes, the jaw line really helps.
You, know where the face
is oriented.
Number two, we need the lips because
the lips tell a lot about frowns,
smiles. And then we need the eyes.
The eyes are hugely expressive
in humans.
Chris, give us just neutral here.
And just, you know, think about
just work
or whatever you're doing, and
nothing particularly important.
Now give me a positive.
OK? A small smile, nothing big.
Just a small joke, there you go.
And now don't be so dramatic with
the negative but definitely show me
something negative, like you're
annoyed that somebody's...
You don't have to show sadness.
Try and give me some anger.
There you go, bingo.
It's not just emotion.
Another important state of mind
in space
is how much concentration you have.
We discovered that the most reliable
measure, better than brainwave,
was speed of the eyelid closure,
the levator palpebrae muscle
in the eyelid.
And that's what these little green
boxes are tracking,
and as we get more tired,
no matter what we're doing,
the speed of the eyelid blink slows.
Now, it's only slowing in 100,
200, 300 thousandths of a second
so it's almost not visible to
a human, but in this case
the computer can measure it with
a great deal of precision.
And that means you're highly likely
to have a lapse of attention,
to have either a microsleep
or fail to respond
in a timely manner to
something you're monitoring.
And that's why this is so valuable,
because now we know your emotion,
and we know if you're tired or
fatigued from inadequate sleep,
sleep loss, circadian desynchrony
on the spacecraft.
But is it overkill to design
a machine to do a job
so instinctive for humans?
You could argue, "Well, can't
a human just do it, then?"
Are you serious?
Is a human going to actually look
at, you know, every 30 seconds
or a minute, a face constantly for a
17-month mission? It's not realistic.
Better to have a machine do it,
with an algorithm,
then it feeds it back in aggregate.
Then a human can say,
"Give me that section
of the mission right here,
"and give me this astronaut,"
"and what's going on here?
Cos we saw a big spike here".
But what this research cannot answer
is the question that might
keep a would-be Mars astronaut
awake at night.
What if you or one of your
crew members DID break down?
How would you deal with it?
You can't step outside to calm down.
It's a frightening thought.
One we've never faced before.
Thankfully, life in space is not
all rumination and introspection.
There are everyday, practical
issues to attend to.
How do you keep yourself clean?
Tidy? Healthy?
How do you cope with the barest
necessities?
Here we are at the throne!
Number two, right here.
I'll show you.
But you see, it's pretty small
so you have to have pretty good aim.
And this guy right here...
is for number one.
People always ask about toilet paper.
"What do you do with toilet paper?
What kind of toilet paper
do you have?"
We have gloves, just because
sometimes it does get messy.
We have some Russian wipes,
which are a little bit coarse
if you like the coarse
type of toilet paper.
We have Huggies, erm,
just for any clean-ups.
You know, we were all babies once
and this sort of helps.
And, of course, you do have your
privacy. There's a little door.
But once you've closed that door
and flushed the handle,
what happens next?
How do you deal with years of waste,
with no plumbing and no sewers?
Here in Tucson, Arizona,
Taber McCallum,
a specialist in space
life-support systems,
is dealing with the nitty-gritty
of this question.
And in space,
he believes what comes out
must be inextricably linked to
what goes in.
So one of the most important
things we need to stay alive
is drinking water.
And people consume about two
litres a day of drinking water,
so for a 500-day mission, that's
a ton of water. Four crew,
that's four tonnes of water
you'd have to bring with you,
so we have to drink the same
water over and over again.
Taber is into recycling
in a big way.
What we have is a sample of
today's urine
and then we put that urine on one
side of a special set of membranes.
Similar to the way plants essentially
treat water for us
by transpiring the water through
the membrane of the cell,
the water then goes in
on one side of the membrane,
travels from molecule to molecule,
and at the other side of
the membrane, evaporates away.
So it's a process of hydration
and dehydration,
and in that process of the membrane
we selectively only get water.
He's hoping to reclaim
98% of drinkable water
from the crew's urine.
That's a significant improvement
from the 75%
currently recycled
on the space station.
But Taber has also
set his sights on solid waste.
There's two issues with solid waste.
One is there is water in that solid
waste that we'd like to extract,
but even if you didn't bother
to extract that water out, what
am I going to do with bags of solid
human waste for a year and a half?
You've got to stabilize it
somehow, that it won't produce
lots of gases and smell bad
and ferment and who knows!
So some people keep suggesting,
"Why don't you just blast this
waste into outer space?"
One of the more interesting reasons
not to is that we'd end up
at Mars with a cloud of waste
around the spaceship.
It's not going anywhere. It's already
on the trajectory that we're on.
So you really want to keep all that
stuff away from the spacecraft
and make good use of this material.
It's good material - we just have
to figure out how to use it.
For some reason I can't get any
of the lab techs interested
in this project!
It may seem trivial, but a mission
to Mars will only become
a practical reality
if these problems,
that all of us take for granted
in our Earthly lives, can be solved.
But imagine the recycling of waste
was sorted.
And imagine your body
and mind could be kept strong.
If you were on the way to Mars,
there would still remain one
powerful threat to your survival.
Radiation.
Just how much radiation you,
as an astronaut, would be exposed to
was quantified by the recent
Curiosity mission.
And they found it to be several
hundred times more intense
than on Earth.
And that's a problem.
So one important factor of, actually,
life on Earth
and how we were able to evolve
is that we're protected
from the radiation of galactic
cosmic rays
and from the radiation of the sun by
the magnetic field of the Earth,
which is caused by the iron core of
the Earth.
That magnetic field creates
a protective shield around
our planet called the magnetosphere,
which deflects radiation.
The more dangerous solar particles
don't get through
so that we, mostly, receive only
life-giving sunshine.
But out in space,
everything is different.
Out here, the bubbling surface
of the sun occasionally builds
to a huge explosion.
These solar flares throw out
massive bursts of radiation
and high-energy protons,
which might damage your DNA,
causing mutations and cancer
later on.
Fortunately, there's a way
of dealing with this - shielding.
Jeff Cerro is investigating the best
materials to absorb radiation.
So we're looking at taking a garment
and filling it with water,
which you see a first
concept of here.
This astronaut with a water wall
built into his wearable garment.
So this is something that you fill
for an event and you're not really
charging the system the penalty
of carrying all this mass.
You need the water anyways
for drinking, for contingency water.
So it gives protection.
It may be a different form
but with a lot less mass penalty
to it.
Doubling up on function
using materials that would be
on board anyway is an idea that
Jeff is enthusiastic about.
We're trying to look at protecting
astronauts using the logistics
which we already have on hand,
so there's food,
items that we have in these bags that
unfold to form a wall.
If you put a wall against the outside
surface, you're trying to place
all these items between the astronaut
and radiation you've got outside.
So the more items you can
put between him and that,
you know, you attenuate
the radiation,
the safer he'll be during this
36-hour solar particle event.
So, we've tried with food,
we're trying to use water
but we're trying to use that you'll
have on board the station anyways.
But there's an even bigger
problem...
Another source of radiation
that's even more damaging -
galactic cosmic rays.
Galactic cosmic rays are
high-energy particles
spewed out from supernovae -
exploding stars.
Their effects are pernicious.
By affecting the growth of brain
cells, they can induce memory loss
in an astronaut after
just six months in space.
But to shield a crew from
radiation such as this
is currently impossible, so they
have to look for other answers.
The best solution is to have
people who are less
susceptible to the effects, or get
there more quickly, so the lower
time in exposure is going to result
in a lower risk to the crew members.
So the "right stuff" for a Mars
astronaut might not just be defined
physically and psychologically,
but also genetically.
There's a theoretical possibility
as well that we could find some
genetic markers of people
who are less susceptible to
the kinds of damage that
occur during radiation.
It's too early in any of our research
programmes to be able to
speculate on that, but it's certainly
a theoretical possibility,
and it's one that we'll be
investigating over the next few
years of our programme.
But, for now, the stark reality is
there is no obvious solution
to the problem of surviving
space radiation.
At the moment, this is one of the
great unknowns of a mission to Mars.
But assume you've escaped
the radiation
and the mission is on track.
After being launched in
the world's biggest rocket,
you've staved off the weakening
effects of zero gravity...
..you've kept yourself sane...
you've managed to
recycle everything...
..and you've survived solar flares.
So now, after travelling
for over eight months
and across 56 million kilometres
of space,
you're finally arriving
at the planet Mars.
Now comes the greatest engineering
challenge of the whole mission -
landing.
Dr Adam Steltzner has been set
the task of working out
how it'll be done.
He masterminded the audacious
landing of the Curiosity rover
on Mars in 2013.
I have tried to describe that many
times and I fall short.
And I fall short because it
pegged my emotion level, you know,
I have a meter... It just buried
the needle.
But my career's not over. I'm going
try and make something better.
But landing a human crew
is a different matter entirely.
So landing Curiosity, a ton,
biggest thing we've landed on Mars
to date, a challenge.
But not nearly as much of
a challenge as landing humans.
Humans are sensitive,
they're delicate, they don't
like a lot of Gs, they like to carry
water with them, they're heavy.
So we think that landing humans
might be something like
40 metric tonnes, or maybe more.
Once again, with a spacecraft
carrying humans,
it's the bigger size that raises
challenges.
There's this interesting bit
of physics that occurs
as you scale up things.
Imagine scaling up a drop of water.
As it gets small or big,
its weight goes up with the size
of it...
..cubed, raised to the third power.
But its aerodynamic drag gets larger
based on its area,
which is its diameter squared.
What that means is, the bigger this
self-similar thing gets,
the more easily it falls.
Same thing happens with spacecraft.
So if you think about Curiosity,
she came in going very, very fast,
slowing down, slowing down,
and eventually making contact
with the surface.
The smaller size of Curiosity
meant that it was successfully
slowed by aerodynamic drag
as it fell.
But scaling up the size for
a human lander changes
the physics of landing, radically.
I've got this self-similar shape.
I'm going to not put
Curiosity on the surface,
but I'm going to put two Curiositys.
OK, three, four, five,
getting a little challenging.
40.
Now, all of a sudden I can't fly
that shape. It's the same shape
it was before, it's packed
at the same densities of spacecraft,
but now it ends up flying
a trajectory
that intercepts the surface of
Mars when its moving Mach 20.
Not good.
Perhaps to get really big
things to the surface of Mars,
what we need to do is...
..we need to make our shape
like this,
which regular rockets look like,
but when we come flying in,
we don't put the pointy end in
or the back end in,
we come in sideways.
By coming in sideways, the drag
on the spacecraft is increased
significantly, slowing the rocket
from hypersonic to supersonic.
To slow it down further,
you need something else to
push against the gravity of Mars.
It's called supersonic
retro-propulsion.
Imagine motorbiking with your mouth
open at 60 miles an hour.
It's, "Whoa!"
It fills your mouth with air
and it's actually sometimes hard
to breathe out against it.
Well, that is the challenge
of supersonic retro-repulsion.
You're going to light a rocket off
into the flow,
but it's going to be supersonic flow.
Well, NASA's working on that.
And it's likely to take those rockets
from a supersonic condition
all the way down to the surface.
It's an inventive and daring idea.
But to carry out this manoeuvre
calls once more on one
of the sticking points that bedevils
this entire mission -
fuel.
Retro-rockets will need a lot of it.
And where that fuel comes from is
something NASA will have to solve
if they are ever to reach Mars.
To stand on the planet Mars.
What would be the reality
of this centuries-old dream?
Well, the good news is,
not a lot of weather on Mars.
It's very dry, it's windy,
it can be dusty.
But the bad news is
that when the little weather there
does stir the dust,
it can create scenes like this.
These are real images
of a dust storm on Mars,
captured by a NASA rover.
When these storms do kick up,
they can go on for months
and envelop the whole planet.
It's likely to be a far harsher
situation than any astronaut faced
on the lunar landings.
Even on the Moon,
conditions weren't easy.
Lunar soil is clingy and caustic -
its particles were small enough
to cause a kind of lunar dust
hay fever in the astronauts,
and sharp enough
to wear though their Kevlar boots.
But no Apollo mission stayed on
the Moon for longer than four days,
and they all used
their lander as a base.
On Mars, life will be harder.
The dust whipping around in the wind
is known to contain carcinogens
and other damaging chemicals
called perchlorates.
What's more, Mars astronauts will be
expected to stay for a whole year
before the planets line up for them
to take the shortest journey
back to Earth.
So for these astronauts to live
and work comfortably on the Martian
surface, they're going to need
a new form of protection.
In charge of developing
the next-generation spacesuit
is Dr Amy Ross.
So, one of the videos that
we watch a lot is the Charlie Duke
dropping the hammer
on Apollo 16 video.
He's trying to take a core sample,
he's hitting that core with his
hammer, and he just loses the hammer.
He has real trouble
retrieving the hammer,
so he just resorts basically
to falling on it.
You can see we've progressed
quite a ways,
and so our crew members now
and our subjects now
can do all of those functional,
realistic tasks that you need to do
in a much more normal fashion that
didn't scare spacesuit engineers
like Charlie did on Apollo.
Remarkably, spacesuits have changed
little since the Apollo days,
and those worn on the Space Station
are just as bulky.
So Amy is looking to slim down
and add flexibility
in every way she can.
So we have a side bearing which
allows you to rotate your shoulder.
And then we have an upper-arm
bearing, which you can see here,
that lets you rotate your arm.
Now, in the waist area,
this suit was built so it can allow
flexion extension joint,
a waist bearing, and allows them
some pretty wide range of motion,
very natural, and you move your waist
a lot when you walk
and you don't realise that, so that's
a very important joint to have.
And then we can watch him squat...
He can get down to his boots.
So he can adjust his boots
when the suit's pressurised.
Can you touch the ground?
And you can see the joints work
as he's doing these functional tasks.
Seemingly small developments
like this take NASA ever closer
to the prospect
of sending humans to Mars.
But from setting up a home on Mars
to knowing how they'll generate
enough food and oxygen,
there are many thousands
of these steps left to conquer.
And the final unknown is this.
Will the Mars astronauts
be able to get home?
When the Apollo astronauts returned,
it was to a heroes' welcome.
But for the astronauts
going to Mars,
there's rather more uncertainty
about their homecoming.
And that's because, as yet, no-one's
worked out a way to get them home.
For now, this is a problem
that NASA is trying to solve.
I would expect that
they would come back.
We wouldn't design a mission
unless we were pretty certain
they were going to be able
to get back safely.
That's one of our objectives.
We want to explore, which means
getting there and coming back
and telling us what happened.
We value, in our modern society,
life too greatly
to send astronauts on a one-way trip
to the surface of Mars,
intentionally, certainly.
There are tremendous risks.
The brave men and women who go
into the astronaut corp...
..take on those risks knowingly.
And sometimes astronauts perish.
Part of planning the mission
will be about the risks
NASA are willing to accept.
But that's a delicate balance.
Because the more they aim
to protect the astronauts,
the higher the cost
and the further into the future
the dream will be pushed.
A momentum is starting to build
around a manned mission to Mars.
Not just at NASA, but within
other privately owned companies
who may work alongside them
or even in competition.
Here at NASA, the scientists
and engineers are doing what
they love doing - starting to
grapple with problems which,
at first sight, seem unsolvable.
If we committed ourselves
to getting to Mars,
we'd BE on Mars.
Certainly within a decade.
I believe that we could get there
within a decade.
The question is, are we willing to
spend the efforts, the resources,
the capital to do that?
And I think the answer is,
right now, no.
But maybe sometime in the future.
One reality is dawning.
Given the scale of this challenge,
it's one that no country
can tackle on its own.
More likely than not, a Mars mission
will be a multi-national mission,
so one political person
in one country isn't going
to drive the whole thing.
It's going to require a lot
of cooperation from countries
around the globe.
So this becomes
a very interesting challenge,
but one that Earthlings
will take on
and not just people
from one country.
So the greatest challenge of this
mission to put Earthlings on Mars
may not be a scientific
or engineering one.
Whichever countries or companies
join the undertaking,
it will be ambitious,
risky and expensive.
But, above all, their challenge is
to re-kindle the dream
of manned space travel...
..beyond our own planet.
What are we doing
when we are exploring other worlds,
other planets,
our solar system, our universe?
We are engaging in one of the most
fundamentally human acts.
We are following our curiosity.
We are more curious than any other
creature on this planet.
Ignition.
Mars, the Red Planet.
We've long wondered
if it's harboured life.
Some have dreamt of walking
on its surface.
More than four decades
after they landed on the Moon,
NASA are now imagining a two-year
ride across space...
..to Mars.
The scorecard of Mars
is at best 50/50.
It's tough to get there.
If you think about putting humans
in harm's way, it's a tough job.
To do it, they need
new rockets on a new scale...
..a new way of surviving in space...
..and a new breed of astronauts...
Think about a mission to Mars.
What is it? Is it outdoor stuff,
or is it confinement?
And then I see somebody that says,
"I have a stamp collection,
"I do a lot of reading,
I enjoy watching movies."
And I'm thinking, "That might be
good for confinement."
To finally go to Mars
would be the fulfilment
of one of our grandest dreams.
I long for a time when I can
actually walk out of my back yard,
stare at space, spot Mars,
and actually think,
"There are humans on Mars, right
now, and we helped put them there."
But is this ultimately
a dream NASA can really deliver?
Right now on Mars, there is
an object the size of a car,
roaming about on the surface.
It was sent across
vast voids of space
to this harsh and rocky planet.
And now, every day, it opens
its eyes upon on another world,
trawls the surface for signs of life
and sends back images like these...
Now NASA want to go a stage further
and put a group of people
up here with it.
And so the man who masterminded
the landing of this rover
is now part of a team
trying to work out
if humans can safely be sent
to join it on Mars.
Mars is a tough place to get to.
It's a scary, expensive
and risky proposition for robots.
When you think about pitting a human
in harm's way,
you've got to double down
on your engineering
to make sure
that everything goes right.
The simple truth is that
much of the technology they'll need
doesn't yet exist.
People get, I think, confused
by the technologies on Star Trek.
And perhaps in 400 or 500 years
from now,
we'll have those
kinds of technologies available.
But for the present time,
if we want to do space exploration,
there are risks.
And the longer the mission,
and the farther away we go,
then the higher
the risks are going to be.
The history of previous, unmanned,
missions provides little comfort.
So Mars is a risky place to go.
Early attempts -
Mariner 3 and Mariner 8,
almost everything the Soviets
tried to put there,
the Mars Polar Lander in '99 -
all these missions have failed.
The scorecard of Mars is
at best 50/50.
So as NASA set their sights
on a manned mission to Mars,
can they pull it off?
The scientists and engineers
at NASA are returning
to the business they're famous for -
transforming a fantastical idea into
a precise set of engineering plans.
These are the people who must face,
and overcome,
every problem involved in sending
human beings
56 million kilometres from Earth.
Everything from stopping them
from going mad with boredom,
to dealing with years
of human waste.
It's quite a challenge.
And the team must begin at the
beginning, by escaping planet Earth.
If anyone should ever ask you
to build a spaceship to go to Mars,
then, like any craftsman,
you first have to find
a space to work in.
This vast hangar, once home
to key parts of the Apollo rockets
and Space Shuttle, is where
a rocket that'll one day
go to Mars will take shape.
Ricardo Navarro
is clearing the decks
so that assembly
of the rocket can begin.
It's so much larger than what
we did here before. So much taller.
The best way to assemble something
this complex and this big
is to assemble it vertically.
You generally want
to build like you fly.
So they start at the bottom,
with the fuel tanks.
This is as high as we can go using
the elevator. The rest is on foot.
It's hard to tell
with this big of a space
how big the actual vehicle's
going to be, the rocket.
But you can actually already see
some signs emerging.
You can see that blue circle
forming.
That is the actual diameter
of the rocket.
So you can imagine something
of that diameter, all the way up
to about ten feet below
where we are right now,
being the actual size
of the hydrogen tank.
Even at this height,
we cannot contain the entire rocket.
The rocket is called
the Space Launch System, or SLS.
And this building can only
accommodate half of it.
So far, very little of the SLS
exists beyond the drawing boards,
save for one part
that's already under construction.
Here, in New Orleans,
they're building the first section
of this monster rocket -
the fuel tanks.
Lead engineer Todd May has come
to see the first completed section.
And this is what it's like
to be inside a rocket.
To keep it light,
it's made out of aluminium,
using a design inspired by nature.
This is an iso-grid pattern.
It looks a little like honeycombs.
You know, bees are pretty smart.
We make this this way to actually
keep most of the strength
of the material while being able to
remove 90% of the weight.
Keeping the weight down
is imperative,
because this seven-metre-high slab
is just one of many
which will make up
the overall rocket.
Now, to make a core of a rocket,
you actually have to have
the equivalent of ten of these tall.
You have a hydrogen tank, which is
the equivalent of five of these,
plus a dome on either end.
And then the liquid oxygen tank,
which is two of these
with a dome on either end.
The core, when you're finished, is
two thirds of a football field long.
By the time you add
the interim upper stage,
it's taller than
the Statue of Liberty.
This giant piece of metal
will be useful for just moments.
So, to give you a sense
of what's going on through launch,
this section, which is
filled with rocket fuel,
is pouring it out through
the engines very quickly.
Just one section like this
would empty in about a minute.
This is the only piece of the rocket
that exists right now.
But before it can be tested in 2017,
millions of other parts
will be made to join it.
July 1969. The launch of Apollo 11.
The mission - to leave Earth
and carry three men
in a 30-ton capsule...
..a distance
of 385,000 kilometres...
..and to be the first to step on the
surface of a body other than Earth.
It was a phenomenal feat.
And the whole experience
took little more than a week.
CHEERING
But Mars is a very different
proposition to the Moon.
Lying 56 million kilometres
from Earth,
Mars is over 140 times farther away.
With current technology,
a return journey
would take around three years,
and require a team
of four to eight astronauts.
Anyone who thinks this is Apollo
with bigger rockets
needs to think again.
Because this is a mission that
will take man, for the first time,
out of Earth's orbit,
leaving its protection far behind.
Stennis, Mississippi.
This is the place
where every single rocket engine
that NASA has ever built
has been tested...
..from Saturn V to the Space Shuttle
main engine.
Today, Mission Control are setting
up for a full-power burn
of one of their latest models.
Gary Benton,
who's in charge of rocket testing,
has come to oversee the burn.
SIREN BLARES
The one-minute siren.
So we're within a minute now.
We're getting close. My heart's
beating pretty fast right now.
I've got some adrenaline
rushing through me.
And there'll be more once it
cranks up here in a few minutes.
We're off!
An engine like this
will be just one of six
which will help propel
the SLS into orbit.
Looks like a safe shutdown.
So when the time comes to test
the much bigger SLS rocket,
it must be at the largest
stand they have.
Like so much in the mission to Mars,
they'll be standing on the shoulders
of NASA's previous missions,
borrowing and re-purposing the best
from Apollo and the Shuttle.
How's it going, man?
It's going good. All right.
B Stand was built
over 50 years ago
for the testing of the Saturn
engines that carried the Apollo
missions to space.
You can't walk round there, cos
there's so many people. Right.
Gary and his team will be reshaping
and upgrading this stand
so that it can cope
with the next generation of rockets.
This is the same crane that we used
to lift those Saturn V four-stages
and we're going to use the very same
crane to lift the SLS four-stage
and place it in this facility,
anchor it down really good.
Firing off about two million pounds
of thrust.
And that's going to be the biggest
test we've done out here
since we did the Saturn V.
There's a palpable
sense of excitement here
because for the first time
in decades,
they're thinking of using these
rockets to send PEOPLE
beyond Earth's orbit.
For now, this is NASA's
best vision of what a rocket
bound for Mars would look like.
'Eight, seven, six, five, four...'
But if you're going
all the way to Mars,
a single rocket of this size
is not enough.
NASA estimates that they will
need at least seven launches
to get all the equipment
they need up into space.
The fuel, the food,
the Mars Lander -
all will need to be launched
into Earth's orbit
and then assembled in space,
much as the Space Station has been.
Only then will it be ready
to leave Earth's orbit.
But there's an uncomfortable truth
about the journey ahead.
Since they can't carry enough
fuel for the full distance,
they need to rely on
Mars's gravity to pull them in.
It's called the slingshot effect
and it means that once they're off,
there's no turning back.
Anyone who's willing to leave
the safety of Earth behind
needs to be a very particular
type of person.
Back in the days of Apollo 11,
picking a crew was straightforward.
It was clear
who had the right stuff.
Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin
and Michael Collins
were the cream
of US supersonic flight.
They were drawn from the elite
world of fighter and test pilots.
And with that came supreme hand-eye
co-ordination and physical daring.
But these may not be the same skills
you'd need to go to Mars.
I noticed that a lot of the
astronauts were of the old school.
"I hunt, I fish, I ski,
"I climb mountains, I climb trees..."
You know, lots of outdoor stuff.
But think about a mission to Mars.
What is it?
Is it outdoor stuff
or is it confinement?
And then I see somebody that says,
"I have a stamp collection,
"I do a lot of reading,
I enjoy watching movies."
And I'm thinking, "That might be
good for confinement!"
Dr David Dinges is interested
in how you select a crew
and safeguard their psychological
welfare in space.
And the key issue is really
understanding who's going to develop
a problem and when will it develop?
Will all the crew develop it?
How do we detect it?
How do we prevent it to begin with?
To date, the only answers
come from a Russian study -
an Earth-bound simulation
of the approximately 520 days
in isolation it would take
for a return trip to the Red Planet.
As the Russian study was gearing up,
Dr Dinges set himself a challenge.
Could he use his expert knowledge
to anticipate
who would fare best in confinement?
In the Mars 520 mission
I watched the crew intensively.
I wanted to see them during
the maelstrom of media attention
before they went in to the chamber
and how they interacted
in that environment.
And body posture, where they were
looking, what they said.
When they went in,
he made his prediction.
And I made notes and I wrote
down a variety of things.
I made predictions - and this is
true - I sealed it up in an envelope
and put it in the drawer and
waited till the mission was over.
In this footage, released
by the European Space Agency,
the astronauts look well.
But by the end,
deep troubles were brewing.
The bottom line is that out
of six people who went,
only two didn't have significant
behavioural problems
of one kind or another.
A couple of them
experienced insomnia.
One experienced some depression.
Another was more socially isolated.
But the two I predicted would make it
just fine made it just fine.
Like the Apollo missions,
the Russian study was all-male.
But what if NASA were to shake up
this tradition?
I suspect we're going to find
there are some areas women have
a slight advantage. In some areas
men have a slight advantage.
Bone loss or radiation. And so
I think a mixed crew is likely.
The agencies want to show that the
astronauts represent humanity, right?
And that's a reasonable thing to do.
NASA hope to launch
the mission in 2033.
So the astronauts who'll get to go
are probably still at school.
If you were among those astronauts
on board,
you'd sense the major physical
challenge immediately -
a lack of gravity.
It's a problem faced
every day on the Space Station
but, so far, no-one has spent
more than 15 months in low gravity.
But if you were on your way to Mars,
you'd be away for twice that time.
For the scientists the question is,
how do you understand
the long-term effects
of weightlessness here on Earth?
Good afternoon! Time for lunch.
Lunch, already?
Yes. Isn't it amazing how time
flies? Let's eat! Bon appetit!
Welcome to the weird, horizontal
world of Frank and Daniel.
They've volunteered to spend
70 days in a row lying down,
as part of an ongoing study
on the effects of weightlessness.
That's because the closest thing
to zero-g conditions
here on Earth is to lie in bed.
But that's much harder work
than it looks.
The second morning waking up
from the bed-rest,
you kind of, you know, want to try to
normally sit up like you normally do,
but then you bring the lamp
down to you to turn on your lights.
You don't go up to the lamp.
It's a little difficult.
Yeah, taking a dump here's
not too pleasant!
But, you know, what can you do?
You've got to do it.
It's not too bad, you know.
I guess I can finally say I know how
to use one of our bedpans!
HE LAUGHS
You should try it.
It's a good experience!
HE LAUGHS
Hey, Frank, how is it going?
It's been pretty good, you know.
You're on bed-rest day 28!
That's correct.
Yeah, so how was it when you first
went head down?
Dr Roni Cromwell
is running the trial,
which overall has 27 subjects.
So we get people
from all walks of life.
We've had people
who are between jobs,
that are looking
for something to do.
We've had people that wish they
had been able to be an astronaut
and since that couldn't happen, they
wanted to do the next best thing.
Roni ensures that all the subjects
are kept with their heads tilted
six degrees down, which best
emulates the effects of space.
And by tipping them six degrees
head down tilt,
we see the headward fluid shifts,
that is similar to what astronauts
experience in space as well.
And by doing that we can then study
the mechanisms for these changes
as well as develop countermeasures
to mitigate these changes.
A typical day starts
with breakfast in bed...
..and a shower...in bed.
After lunch, tests...in bed.
My favourite part!
Today, they're investigating
a mission-critical problem -
why astronauts often
lose their appetite in space.
During weightlessness,
body fluids flow into the head
and scientists believe
this may affect the airflow.
So they're measuring the size
of Frank's nasal cavity,
to look for swelling
which might restrict
his sense of smell and taste.
Daniel is slightly luckier.
He's among the 50% of subjects
who are selected
to occasionally escape bed
to study the effects of exercise.
It can be a little bewildering...
The reason for optimising
the exercise programme
is to find the best sort of recipe
for the exercise that's needed
to preserve muscle and bone
in our astronauts.
Exercise has long been known
as a means of staving off
loss of bone and muscle mass
in space.
Because the effects of this
can be devastating.
These astronauts, just landed
from the Soyuz capsule in 2013,
are too weak to even stand,
let alone walk.
On a mission to Mars, the effects
would be even more pronounced.
After all,
it's a much longer journey.
But there'll be no-one on Mars
to carry them away.
The astronauts must be able to step
out of the capsule
and onto the Martian surface
by themselves.
Scientists are realising that
exercise alone, however optimised,
is not enough.
If humans are ever going to be
strong enough to explore
the Martian surface,
they'll need some other help
to keep them fit
for the adventure ahead.
You may never even notice it,
but millions of years of evolution
have finely tuned your body
to conditions on planet Earth,
so that cells in your muscle
and your bone simply can't grow
without the force of gravity
acting on them.
So Dr Randall Urban is looking
for something that can stimulate
muscle and bone growth,
in the absence of gravity.
And he's turned his attention
to a chemical
that's well known for building
your body.
Well, testosterone
is a very interesting hormone
and it seems to be primarily
responsible for protection of bone
and protection of muscle.
Dr Urban is working
with the bed-rest study.
He's giving regular injections
of testosterone
to half of the subjects
who are exercising.
But it's a double-blind study,
so no-one knows who's getting
the testosterone and who isn't.
We see that one of the exercise
groups is doing much better
than the other exercise group.
In our minds, we think
that may be the testosterone group
which is showing that benefit.
Daniel doesn't know whether he's
received the testosterone or not.
He'll just keep on running
and having his bone and muscle mass
monitored, until his 70 days are up.
The results of the study will help
determine whether astronauts
travelling to Mars
will take doses of testosterone
to keep their bones
and muscles strong.
But that raises
an interesting question.
What if some of those astronauts
are women?
When we use testosterone in women
we have to be very concerned
about the side effects
which actually will cause them
to develop male characteristics.
We would have to be figuring out
ways to deliver testosterone
in low enough doses
that you wouldn't get
any of those other characteristics
in the women.
It remains to be seen whether
testosterone can be given to women,
not to mention a group of
competitive men in a confined space.
But the health risks
of travelling to Mars
don't just threaten the body.
Perhaps the greatest challenge
of all is in the mind.
Ignition.
Imagine you're one of the astronauts
and you've now been on board
for several months,
in the same small place,
with the same few people.
You've played all
the games on your tablet
and the view out of the window
never changes.
You may start to feel a little
bored. Perhaps a little glum.
And this is important, not just
because it's nice to be happy.
Having a functioning team
on a spaceship
can be a matter of life and death.
If you become depressed
in space flight,
if you develop a poor interaction
style or you become socially
isolated because something's wrong
and your brain can't cope
or your behaviour's off, or you
become cognitively impaired,
then you pose a risk for yourself
and the rest of the crew
and the mission.
These problems occurred in the past
with Shackleton, with Nansen,
with Amundsen,
with all the great expeditions.
They remain fundamental problems.
One solution being tested
by Dr Dinges and his team
is to use the spacecraft's
on-board cameras
to watch over the astronauts
day and night.
I want to review, sort of, what
we've got. OK, so get position.
Centre yourself.
Dr Dinges and his team are using
new facial recognition software,
and its success hinges
on identifying tell-tale signs
in the face, which betray what
the mind beyond is really thinking.
Number one, for just tracking
purposes, the jaw line really helps.
You, know where the face
is oriented.
Number two, we need the lips because
the lips tell a lot about frowns,
smiles. And then we need the eyes.
The eyes are hugely expressive
in humans.
Chris, give us just neutral here.
And just, you know, think about
just work
or whatever you're doing, and
nothing particularly important.
Now give me a positive.
OK? A small smile, nothing big.
Just a small joke, there you go.
And now don't be so dramatic with
the negative but definitely show me
something negative, like you're
annoyed that somebody's...
You don't have to show sadness.
Try and give me some anger.
There you go, bingo.
It's not just emotion.
Another important state of mind
in space
is how much concentration you have.
We discovered that the most reliable
measure, better than brainwave,
was speed of the eyelid closure,
the levator palpebrae muscle
in the eyelid.
And that's what these little green
boxes are tracking,
and as we get more tired,
no matter what we're doing,
the speed of the eyelid blink slows.
Now, it's only slowing in 100,
200, 300 thousandths of a second
so it's almost not visible to
a human, but in this case
the computer can measure it with
a great deal of precision.
And that means you're highly likely
to have a lapse of attention,
to have either a microsleep
or fail to respond
in a timely manner to
something you're monitoring.
And that's why this is so valuable,
because now we know your emotion,
and we know if you're tired or
fatigued from inadequate sleep,
sleep loss, circadian desynchrony
on the spacecraft.
But is it overkill to design
a machine to do a job
so instinctive for humans?
You could argue, "Well, can't
a human just do it, then?"
Are you serious?
Is a human going to actually look
at, you know, every 30 seconds
or a minute, a face constantly for a
17-month mission? It's not realistic.
Better to have a machine do it,
with an algorithm,
then it feeds it back in aggregate.
Then a human can say,
"Give me that section
of the mission right here,
"and give me this astronaut,"
"and what's going on here?
Cos we saw a big spike here".
But what this research cannot answer
is the question that might
keep a would-be Mars astronaut
awake at night.
What if you or one of your
crew members DID break down?
How would you deal with it?
You can't step outside to calm down.
It's a frightening thought.
One we've never faced before.
Thankfully, life in space is not
all rumination and introspection.
There are everyday, practical
issues to attend to.
How do you keep yourself clean?
Tidy? Healthy?
How do you cope with the barest
necessities?
Here we are at the throne!
Number two, right here.
I'll show you.
But you see, it's pretty small
so you have to have pretty good aim.
And this guy right here...
is for number one.
People always ask about toilet paper.
"What do you do with toilet paper?
What kind of toilet paper
do you have?"
We have gloves, just because
sometimes it does get messy.
We have some Russian wipes,
which are a little bit coarse
if you like the coarse
type of toilet paper.
We have Huggies, erm,
just for any clean-ups.
You know, we were all babies once
and this sort of helps.
And, of course, you do have your
privacy. There's a little door.
But once you've closed that door
and flushed the handle,
what happens next?
How do you deal with years of waste,
with no plumbing and no sewers?
Here in Tucson, Arizona,
Taber McCallum,
a specialist in space
life-support systems,
is dealing with the nitty-gritty
of this question.
And in space,
he believes what comes out
must be inextricably linked to
what goes in.
So one of the most important
things we need to stay alive
is drinking water.
And people consume about two
litres a day of drinking water,
so for a 500-day mission, that's
a ton of water. Four crew,
that's four tonnes of water
you'd have to bring with you,
so we have to drink the same
water over and over again.
Taber is into recycling
in a big way.
What we have is a sample of
today's urine
and then we put that urine on one
side of a special set of membranes.
Similar to the way plants essentially
treat water for us
by transpiring the water through
the membrane of the cell,
the water then goes in
on one side of the membrane,
travels from molecule to molecule,
and at the other side of
the membrane, evaporates away.
So it's a process of hydration
and dehydration,
and in that process of the membrane
we selectively only get water.
He's hoping to reclaim
98% of drinkable water
from the crew's urine.
That's a significant improvement
from the 75%
currently recycled
on the space station.
But Taber has also
set his sights on solid waste.
There's two issues with solid waste.
One is there is water in that solid
waste that we'd like to extract,
but even if you didn't bother
to extract that water out, what
am I going to do with bags of solid
human waste for a year and a half?
You've got to stabilize it
somehow, that it won't produce
lots of gases and smell bad
and ferment and who knows!
So some people keep suggesting,
"Why don't you just blast this
waste into outer space?"
One of the more interesting reasons
not to is that we'd end up
at Mars with a cloud of waste
around the spaceship.
It's not going anywhere. It's already
on the trajectory that we're on.
So you really want to keep all that
stuff away from the spacecraft
and make good use of this material.
It's good material - we just have
to figure out how to use it.
For some reason I can't get any
of the lab techs interested
in this project!
It may seem trivial, but a mission
to Mars will only become
a practical reality
if these problems,
that all of us take for granted
in our Earthly lives, can be solved.
But imagine the recycling of waste
was sorted.
And imagine your body
and mind could be kept strong.
If you were on the way to Mars,
there would still remain one
powerful threat to your survival.
Radiation.
Just how much radiation you,
as an astronaut, would be exposed to
was quantified by the recent
Curiosity mission.
And they found it to be several
hundred times more intense
than on Earth.
And that's a problem.
So one important factor of, actually,
life on Earth
and how we were able to evolve
is that we're protected
from the radiation of galactic
cosmic rays
and from the radiation of the sun by
the magnetic field of the Earth,
which is caused by the iron core of
the Earth.
That magnetic field creates
a protective shield around
our planet called the magnetosphere,
which deflects radiation.
The more dangerous solar particles
don't get through
so that we, mostly, receive only
life-giving sunshine.
But out in space,
everything is different.
Out here, the bubbling surface
of the sun occasionally builds
to a huge explosion.
These solar flares throw out
massive bursts of radiation
and high-energy protons,
which might damage your DNA,
causing mutations and cancer
later on.
Fortunately, there's a way
of dealing with this - shielding.
Jeff Cerro is investigating the best
materials to absorb radiation.
So we're looking at taking a garment
and filling it with water,
which you see a first
concept of here.
This astronaut with a water wall
built into his wearable garment.
So this is something that you fill
for an event and you're not really
charging the system the penalty
of carrying all this mass.
You need the water anyways
for drinking, for contingency water.
So it gives protection.
It may be a different form
but with a lot less mass penalty
to it.
Doubling up on function
using materials that would be
on board anyway is an idea that
Jeff is enthusiastic about.
We're trying to look at protecting
astronauts using the logistics
which we already have on hand,
so there's food,
items that we have in these bags that
unfold to form a wall.
If you put a wall against the outside
surface, you're trying to place
all these items between the astronaut
and radiation you've got outside.
So the more items you can
put between him and that,
you know, you attenuate
the radiation,
the safer he'll be during this
36-hour solar particle event.
So, we've tried with food,
we're trying to use water
but we're trying to use that you'll
have on board the station anyways.
But there's an even bigger
problem...
Another source of radiation
that's even more damaging -
galactic cosmic rays.
Galactic cosmic rays are
high-energy particles
spewed out from supernovae -
exploding stars.
Their effects are pernicious.
By affecting the growth of brain
cells, they can induce memory loss
in an astronaut after
just six months in space.
But to shield a crew from
radiation such as this
is currently impossible, so they
have to look for other answers.
The best solution is to have
people who are less
susceptible to the effects, or get
there more quickly, so the lower
time in exposure is going to result
in a lower risk to the crew members.
So the "right stuff" for a Mars
astronaut might not just be defined
physically and psychologically,
but also genetically.
There's a theoretical possibility
as well that we could find some
genetic markers of people
who are less susceptible to
the kinds of damage that
occur during radiation.
It's too early in any of our research
programmes to be able to
speculate on that, but it's certainly
a theoretical possibility,
and it's one that we'll be
investigating over the next few
years of our programme.
But, for now, the stark reality is
there is no obvious solution
to the problem of surviving
space radiation.
At the moment, this is one of the
great unknowns of a mission to Mars.
But assume you've escaped
the radiation
and the mission is on track.
After being launched in
the world's biggest rocket,
you've staved off the weakening
effects of zero gravity...
..you've kept yourself sane...
you've managed to
recycle everything...
..and you've survived solar flares.
So now, after travelling
for over eight months
and across 56 million kilometres
of space,
you're finally arriving
at the planet Mars.
Now comes the greatest engineering
challenge of the whole mission -
landing.
Dr Adam Steltzner has been set
the task of working out
how it'll be done.
He masterminded the audacious
landing of the Curiosity rover
on Mars in 2013.
I have tried to describe that many
times and I fall short.
And I fall short because it
pegged my emotion level, you know,
I have a meter... It just buried
the needle.
But my career's not over. I'm going
try and make something better.
But landing a human crew
is a different matter entirely.
So landing Curiosity, a ton,
biggest thing we've landed on Mars
to date, a challenge.
But not nearly as much of
a challenge as landing humans.
Humans are sensitive,
they're delicate, they don't
like a lot of Gs, they like to carry
water with them, they're heavy.
So we think that landing humans
might be something like
40 metric tonnes, or maybe more.
Once again, with a spacecraft
carrying humans,
it's the bigger size that raises
challenges.
There's this interesting bit
of physics that occurs
as you scale up things.
Imagine scaling up a drop of water.
As it gets small or big,
its weight goes up with the size
of it...
..cubed, raised to the third power.
But its aerodynamic drag gets larger
based on its area,
which is its diameter squared.
What that means is, the bigger this
self-similar thing gets,
the more easily it falls.
Same thing happens with spacecraft.
So if you think about Curiosity,
she came in going very, very fast,
slowing down, slowing down,
and eventually making contact
with the surface.
The smaller size of Curiosity
meant that it was successfully
slowed by aerodynamic drag
as it fell.
But scaling up the size for
a human lander changes
the physics of landing, radically.
I've got this self-similar shape.
I'm going to not put
Curiosity on the surface,
but I'm going to put two Curiositys.
OK, three, four, five,
getting a little challenging.
40.
Now, all of a sudden I can't fly
that shape. It's the same shape
it was before, it's packed
at the same densities of spacecraft,
but now it ends up flying
a trajectory
that intercepts the surface of
Mars when its moving Mach 20.
Not good.
Perhaps to get really big
things to the surface of Mars,
what we need to do is...
..we need to make our shape
like this,
which regular rockets look like,
but when we come flying in,
we don't put the pointy end in
or the back end in,
we come in sideways.
By coming in sideways, the drag
on the spacecraft is increased
significantly, slowing the rocket
from hypersonic to supersonic.
To slow it down further,
you need something else to
push against the gravity of Mars.
It's called supersonic
retro-propulsion.
Imagine motorbiking with your mouth
open at 60 miles an hour.
It's, "Whoa!"
It fills your mouth with air
and it's actually sometimes hard
to breathe out against it.
Well, that is the challenge
of supersonic retro-repulsion.
You're going to light a rocket off
into the flow,
but it's going to be supersonic flow.
Well, NASA's working on that.
And it's likely to take those rockets
from a supersonic condition
all the way down to the surface.
It's an inventive and daring idea.
But to carry out this manoeuvre
calls once more on one
of the sticking points that bedevils
this entire mission -
fuel.
Retro-rockets will need a lot of it.
And where that fuel comes from is
something NASA will have to solve
if they are ever to reach Mars.
To stand on the planet Mars.
What would be the reality
of this centuries-old dream?
Well, the good news is,
not a lot of weather on Mars.
It's very dry, it's windy,
it can be dusty.
But the bad news is
that when the little weather there
does stir the dust,
it can create scenes like this.
These are real images
of a dust storm on Mars,
captured by a NASA rover.
When these storms do kick up,
they can go on for months
and envelop the whole planet.
It's likely to be a far harsher
situation than any astronaut faced
on the lunar landings.
Even on the Moon,
conditions weren't easy.
Lunar soil is clingy and caustic -
its particles were small enough
to cause a kind of lunar dust
hay fever in the astronauts,
and sharp enough
to wear though their Kevlar boots.
But no Apollo mission stayed on
the Moon for longer than four days,
and they all used
their lander as a base.
On Mars, life will be harder.
The dust whipping around in the wind
is known to contain carcinogens
and other damaging chemicals
called perchlorates.
What's more, Mars astronauts will be
expected to stay for a whole year
before the planets line up for them
to take the shortest journey
back to Earth.
So for these astronauts to live
and work comfortably on the Martian
surface, they're going to need
a new form of protection.
In charge of developing
the next-generation spacesuit
is Dr Amy Ross.
So, one of the videos that
we watch a lot is the Charlie Duke
dropping the hammer
on Apollo 16 video.
He's trying to take a core sample,
he's hitting that core with his
hammer, and he just loses the hammer.
He has real trouble
retrieving the hammer,
so he just resorts basically
to falling on it.
You can see we've progressed
quite a ways,
and so our crew members now
and our subjects now
can do all of those functional,
realistic tasks that you need to do
in a much more normal fashion that
didn't scare spacesuit engineers
like Charlie did on Apollo.
Remarkably, spacesuits have changed
little since the Apollo days,
and those worn on the Space Station
are just as bulky.
So Amy is looking to slim down
and add flexibility
in every way she can.
So we have a side bearing which
allows you to rotate your shoulder.
And then we have an upper-arm
bearing, which you can see here,
that lets you rotate your arm.
Now, in the waist area,
this suit was built so it can allow
flexion extension joint,
a waist bearing, and allows them
some pretty wide range of motion,
very natural, and you move your waist
a lot when you walk
and you don't realise that, so that's
a very important joint to have.
And then we can watch him squat...
He can get down to his boots.
So he can adjust his boots
when the suit's pressurised.
Can you touch the ground?
And you can see the joints work
as he's doing these functional tasks.
Seemingly small developments
like this take NASA ever closer
to the prospect
of sending humans to Mars.
But from setting up a home on Mars
to knowing how they'll generate
enough food and oxygen,
there are many thousands
of these steps left to conquer.
And the final unknown is this.
Will the Mars astronauts
be able to get home?
When the Apollo astronauts returned,
it was to a heroes' welcome.
But for the astronauts
going to Mars,
there's rather more uncertainty
about their homecoming.
And that's because, as yet, no-one's
worked out a way to get them home.
For now, this is a problem
that NASA is trying to solve.
I would expect that
they would come back.
We wouldn't design a mission
unless we were pretty certain
they were going to be able
to get back safely.
That's one of our objectives.
We want to explore, which means
getting there and coming back
and telling us what happened.
We value, in our modern society,
life too greatly
to send astronauts on a one-way trip
to the surface of Mars,
intentionally, certainly.
There are tremendous risks.
The brave men and women who go
into the astronaut corp...
..take on those risks knowingly.
And sometimes astronauts perish.
Part of planning the mission
will be about the risks
NASA are willing to accept.
But that's a delicate balance.
Because the more they aim
to protect the astronauts,
the higher the cost
and the further into the future
the dream will be pushed.
A momentum is starting to build
around a manned mission to Mars.
Not just at NASA, but within
other privately owned companies
who may work alongside them
or even in competition.
Here at NASA, the scientists
and engineers are doing what
they love doing - starting to
grapple with problems which,
at first sight, seem unsolvable.
If we committed ourselves
to getting to Mars,
we'd BE on Mars.
Certainly within a decade.
I believe that we could get there
within a decade.
The question is, are we willing to
spend the efforts, the resources,
the capital to do that?
And I think the answer is,
right now, no.
But maybe sometime in the future.
One reality is dawning.
Given the scale of this challenge,
it's one that no country
can tackle on its own.
More likely than not, a Mars mission
will be a multi-national mission,
so one political person
in one country isn't going
to drive the whole thing.
It's going to require a lot
of cooperation from countries
around the globe.
So this becomes
a very interesting challenge,
but one that Earthlings
will take on
and not just people
from one country.
So the greatest challenge of this
mission to put Earthlings on Mars
may not be a scientific
or engineering one.
Whichever countries or companies
join the undertaking,
it will be ambitious,
risky and expensive.
But, above all, their challenge is
to re-kindle the dream
of manned space travel...
..beyond our own planet.
What are we doing
when we are exploring other worlds,
other planets,
our solar system, our universe?
We are engaging in one of the most
fundamentally human acts.
We are following our curiosity.
We are more curious than any other
creature on this planet.