Mining the Sky: Untold Riches from the Asteroids, Comets, and Planets. - book reviews

Why should humans go to Mars? One reason is that the job market there looks pretty good. Martian society will experience a chronic shortage of labor, due to the small size of its initial population and the high cost of transportation from Earth. Hence, wages will be high, career opportunities will abound, and innovation will be rewarded. Paperwork, bureaucracy, and the quest for purely formal credentials will be kept to a minimum. Such are the exigencies of life on a harsh frontier.

Such ruminations might sound far-fetched, the stuff of some distant future, perhaps, but of no practical interest to anyone alive today. But that future may be closer than most people, including many space experts, currently think. In The Case for Mars, Robert Zubrin and Richard Wagner present a powerful and pragmatic argument for near-term exploration and colonization of our celestial neighbor. In their telling, the first humans could be on Mars within a decade, and many thousands could be living there by the mid-21st century.

Zubrin, formerly a senior engineer at Lockheed Martin, is the leading proponent of "Mars Direct," a plan for a stripped-down, no-frills, manned mission, using existing or readily developable technologies. Under the plan, a four-member crew travels straight to the Martian surface in a heavy-lift rocket (making no intermediate stops in Earth or Mars orbit); explores large swaths of territory with the aid of ground rovers; and then returns to Earth using an oxygen-methane fuel synthesized from the Martian atmosphere. Eliminated from this scenario are the vast spaceports and Battlestar Galactica - type spaceships traditionally envisioned for interplanetary travel.

By drastically lowering mission costs, Mars Direct could extricate the red planet from its current political oblivion. When President George Bush called for a manned Mars mission, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration responded with a bloated, 30-year, $450 billion plan, which Congress quite justifiably shot down. Mars Direct, by contrast, might cost between $20 billion and $30 billion. (A modified version, called Mars Semi-Direct, with an estimated cost of $55 billion, is now accepted by NASA as a "baseline" for formulating yet more plans. No actual mission is currently scheduled.)

Moreover, cost overruns and bureaucratic inertia could be avoided by turning Mars Direct into a "Mars Prize." Under this approach, formulated by Zubrin and the Progress and Freedom Foundation at the behest of Newt Gingrich, government's role is simply to provide cash incentives for the private sector to perform the mission. This would be done in stages: preliminary rewards for such feats as automated fuel synthesis in the Martian atmosphere, and a $25 billion grand prize for getting a crew to Mars (and back). Unlike the traditional "cost-plus" contracts of the aerospace industry, a Mars Prize would inspire the work to be done under budget.

In addition, Mars Direct's particular trajectory through the solar system, and its avoidance of time spent in orbit, enable an extended (500-day) stay on the surface, rather than a plant-the-flag mission of limited scientific value. The crew, consisting of two field scientists and two high-tech mechanics, would give priority to the search for signs of past or present life on Mars. That cosmic question cannot be explored adequately just by examining Martian meteorites on Earth, or even by sending robot probes to Mars. Imagine, write Zubrin and Wagner, parachuting a remote-controlled rover into the Rocky Mountains and trying to locate a dinosaur fossil.

Increasingly, however, human activity on Mars would be oriented toward the future, toward the building of a permanent society. The Case for Mars sketches out what that might entail, including ever-larger domed habitats and eventual terra-forming to raise temperatures and oxygenate the atmosphere. Beyond such technological challenges, moreover, the book addresses the crucial economic issue: A large-scale human presence on Mars cannot endure indefinitely as a black hole for subsidies from Earth. The fourth planet must pay its own way. How might it do that?

Mars will need a thriving export sector to pay for its imports of manufactured goods from Earth. (Even with a high degree of automation, Martian society's labor shortage ensures that imports will be necessary far into the future. Furthermore, such trade will be desirable, given the rule of comparative advantage.) Fortunately, Mars contains a plenitude of natural resources with export potential. Deuterium, a fuel useful for today's nuclear-power industry and essential for future nuclear-fusion reactors, is a particularly promising candidate for interplanetary commerce.

Ideas as well as natural resources could make valuable exports, as Martian innovations in biotechnology and robotics are licensed for use on Earth. Indeed, the authors argue, investment in the Martian economy could begin even before any humans have set foot there. Mining rights, for example, could be allocated to any company that sends a probe to survey a piece of Martian territory to some specified degree of precision; such rights could be traded actively right now, much as land grants to trans-Appalachian America were bought and sold decades before settlers actually arrived.