Public support, political will needed for Mars mission, astronauts say

NASA expects to send humans to Mars within the next two decades, but it can only do so with the green light from Congress and the White House, astronauts told a breakfast crowd at the National Press Club Monday.

Col. Terry Virts, a former Air Force pilot, and retired astronaut Mark Kelly, whose twin brother Scott is currently the subject of a year-long study in space, insisted that public support and political will are key to realizing what would be a very expensive Mars mission.

“The best scientists and engineers in the world” are continually developing projects at NASA, Kelly said, but a planned space mission can be cancelled at any time by the administration due to budgetary decisions or otherwise.

“It’s more a question of political science than rocket science,” Virts added. The NASA space program, which now has three active Mars rovers exploring the red planet, is “very robust,” he said.

While it will take several years before an astronaut can be sent there, Virts explained that there are two ways to go to Mars: The first would involve what he described as a “chemical rocket” that could take 6-9 months for a one-way trip, resulting in a total of three years for the mission. The second, which he called the “fast boat,” would involve “electric compulsion” by which an astronaut could arrive on Mars within a couple of months, but for that, Virts said, “you’d need a nuclear reactor in space.”

Neither one of those options is far-fetched, he suggested, pointing to the progress between 1961 and 1969, when man first went into orbit, and when man landed on the moon.

“Technology has a lot of promise in it,” Virts said.

In a first for the Club, the crowd was treated to a live video link from the International Space Station, where Scott Kelly had spent 170 days, and where he will stay until his scheduled return to Earth on March 3. The effects on his eyesight and his bone density are among the areas being studied during his year in space, after which the results will be compared to his brother's body, which also remains closely monitored.

“We have no data beyond six months,” Mark Kelly explained. The goal of the study is “to figure out if there are any bends in the curve” that could be problematic for future missions, he said.

There are 400 experiments being conducted in the various labs aboard the ISS, and because astronauts also have to fix things when they break, that “takes away from the science” for a little while, he noted. “We would need more people to get more out of it."

For Scott Kelly, “the adaptation has not stopped,” he said of his experience in a mostly silent, closed environment in zero gravity, but admitted “it’s a privilege” to do the job he’s doing.

“Sometimes when [Mark] sends me pictures of his breakfast, I’m envious,” he confessed.